CH. 18 Lecture Quiz Question

[dsit...@gmail.com]

According to lecture, the rejection of the Aristotelian worldview meant that the following questions had no clear answers.

Why do we not fall off the earth?

Why are we not hurled off the earth?

Why do bodies always fall straight to earth?

Why does the moon not come crashing down to earth?

I cannot come to the correct answer unless of course by trial and error of guessing this question until I may some day get the correct answer. 

This is how I understand this question and why I think the possible chosen are the correct, yet to my dismay they are incorrect. 

Why do we not fall off the earth? Rejecting Aristotelian worldview meant that that Aristotle's spherical earth, earth element natural tendency to move towards center of universe and his earth-centered theory was to be rejected with the new evidence of a round earth and sun-centered theory disproving the earth elements natural tendency to be drawn to center of universe. But then the people at the time did not have a clear answer of how we are not falling off the earth with this new evidence. 

Why are we not hurled off the earth? With the new evidence of earth rotating a complete cycle every 24 hours meaning earth is spinning abo. 1000 mph, the people at the time had no clear answer for this question. 

Why do bodies fall straight to earth? I take the word bodies as meaning "objects." Anyways, since earth is not center of universe and I have already mentioned the fact that Aristotle's theory of earth element being attracted to center of universe (ie. earth) was rejected, they had no clear answers for this question either. 

Why does the moon not come crashing down to earth? This is an interesting question, but is not "According to lecture"

Anyways, questions like these make me doubt the concepts I have learned. Though I seem to understand the reasons, I still cannot answer a simple question as this correctly with the knowledge of reading the chapter and listening/reading the lecture for the chapter. 

[G. Randolph Mayes]

Two of these questions occur in the lecture for Chapter 18, the others do not. You mentioned one that does not, namely: Why does the moon not come crashing down to earth. (Actually this question sounds interesting but there is nothing about the collapse of the Aristotelian worldview that gives rise to it.  Why should it? They had no basis for any expectation at all.)

You're right that that there is no clear answer to the question why bodies fall straight to earth. But it was not held to be generally true that bodies fall straight to earth, and of course they do not. If they did, then they would never observe, say, an arrow moving in a parabola through the sky. They did believe that a body thrown straight up would fall straight down, though. So if the earth was rotating, it made sense to them that it would not return to the origin. This is probably what you are thinking about.  I'll try to clarify this question to make it clear that's not the one being asked.

Thanks for being very clear about the source of your confusion.

[dsit...@gmail.com]

Thank you for reply. The confusion on my part was merely because the question, "Why do objects move toward

the ground?" was mentioned in the lecture. It through me off to believe that it had to be one of the correct answers for that reason.