Question

What we understand today about forces and motion dates back to Galileo and Newton. Before them, people believed Aristotle, who said an object was naturally at rest and only moved if a force was acting on it. According to that logic, a heavier object ought to fall more quickly to the earth when dropped.
Aristotle once again offers an example of how not to suggest new scientific laws. Of course, it's easier to see he was wrong in hindsight, as Hawking notes that everyone was happy to accept Aristotle's teaching, without enquiring any further themselves.

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Aristotle’s teaching also said we could understand the whole universe just by applying logic, so no experiments were required. Galileo was the first to bother to check out the theory about weights falling at different rates. The story goes that Galileo tried it out by dropping things from the Tower of Pisa, but actually he rolled balls of different weights down a hill and measured their acceleration.
Galileo was the first to properly challenge Aristotle's teachings about object's natural state of rest, and actually checked it out for himself. In this way, Hawking shows the importance of an inquisitive mindset, as well as the necessity of double checking and observation.
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Galileo found that each ball increased its speed at the same rate, regardless of its weight. The acceleration of the balls was directly proportionate to the incline of the hill, not their different weights. If one dropped a lead ball and a feather, the ball would drop faster only because air resistance slows the feather. Removing air resistance as a factor would see both fall at the same rate, as shown by astronaut David R. Scott, who performed exactly that experiment on the moon, where there is no air.
By setting up an experiment to check Aristotle's claim, Galileo showed that people had been wrong for centuries, simply because no one had checked. His finding changed how people viewed objects’ movement and how forces worked on them. Later, when humans had advanced enough to travel to the moon, they performed further experiments to confirm his findings. Experiments, Hawking shows, gain better results than guessing.
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Newton used Galileo's measurements as the foundation for his laws of motion. He deduced that the force (the balls' own weight) was constant, and this force caused the object to accelerate, not just set it moving. This meant the absence of force would leave an object moving straight ahead at a constant speed.

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