Jim Menegay  wrote:

> john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> > Jim Menegay  wrote:
> > > Everyone has heard of Newton and his apple, but it is a little known
> > > fact that Archimedes was also a victim of the falling fruit.  After
> > > some investigation, he came up with the theory that apples accelerate
> > > as they fall.  However, his contemporaries pointed out that apple
> > > leaves do not seem to accelerate, and there are more leaves than
> > > apples.  The debate soon turned to whether the leaves outweighed
> > > the apples.  Archimedes eventually lost interest in his original idea
> > > and turned to his brilliant studies regarding the count of the number
> > > of grains of sand in the cosmos.
> > > 
> > > This story was told in the first edition of Plutarch, and was known
> > > to every Roman schoolboy, but it was suppressed from later editions
> > > due to the influence of the neoAristotelian establishment.  ;-)
> > 
> > Care to identify which work by Plutarch it was?
> > http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/browse-Plutarch.html
> > 
> > Otherwise it's just a legend ab urbe condita :-)
> 
> The story was in the Marcellus, I'm told, with the other Archimedes
> anecdotes.  But this doesn't mean that it is not an urban legend, too.

I went to that site and searched, to no avail... we must have the
censored version by those horrid neo-Aristotelians.
> 
> In fact, it is a mistake, I believe, to place urban legends and 
> intellectual history into distinct genres.  The only distinction is in
> the target audience and (as the Marxists might add) the source of 
> patronage.
> 
> It is all just half-lies and distortions intended to edify and amuse.

As the author of some intellectual history, I must demur...
-- 
John Wilkins
john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au   http://www.wilkins.id.au
"Men mark it when they hit, but do not mark it when they miss" 
                                               - Francis Bacon
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