Naïve physics
Naïve physics or
folk physics is the untrained human
perception of basic physical
phenomena. In the field of
artificial intelligence the study of naïve
physics is a part of the effort to formalize the common knowledge of human beings.
Many ideas of folk physics are simplifications, misunderstandings, or misperceptions of well understood phenomena, incapable of giving useful predictions of detailed experiments, or simply are contradicted by more thorough observations. They may sometimes be true, be true in certain limited cases, be true within a large degree of approximation, or predict the same effect but misunderstand the underlying mechanism.
Some examples are:
*What goes up must come down.
*A dropped object falls straight down.
*A dropped lead ball will hit the ground before a wooden ball dropped at the same time and at the same height.
*An object is either at rest or moving, in an absolute sense.
*Two events are simultaneous or they are not.
The ideas that the
world is flat, and that the sun and moon orbit the Earth (the
geocentric model), were also, until about 2000 to 500 years ago, part of mankind's commonsense understanding of the world.
These and similar ideas, in some cases too obvious for anyone to think of questioning them, were the basis for the first work in formulating and systematizing physics,
e.g., by
Aristotle and the medieval
scholastics. In the modern science of physics, they were gradually contradicted by the work of
Galileo,
Newton and others. The final one survived until
1905, when it was contradicted by the
special theory of relativity.
* Barry Smith and Roberto Casati,
Naive Physics: An Essay in Ontology,
Philosophical Psychology, 7/2 (1994), 225-244.
*
Folk mathematics*
Folk psychology*
Lie-to-children*
Occam's Razor*
Weak ontology*
Cartoon physics
