Folk 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 as a good first approximation to a more complex effect, or predict the same effect but misunderstand the underlying mechanism.

Naïve physics can also be defined as an intuitive understanding all humans have about objects in the physical world. Cognitive psychologists are delving deeper into these phenomena with promising results. Psychological studies indicate that certain notions of the physical world are innate in all of us.

Some examples of naïve physics include commonly understood, intuitive, or everyday-observed rules of nature:

Many of these and similar ideas formed the basis for the first works in formulating and systematizing physics by Aristotle and the medieval scholastics in Western civilization. In the modern science of physics, they were gradually contradicted by the work of Galileo, Newton, and others. The idea of absolute simultaneity survived until 1905, when the special theory of relativity and its supporting experiments discredited it.

The increasing sophistication of technology make possible more research on knowledge acquisition. Researchers measure physiological responses (like heart rate or eye movement) to quantify reaction to a particular stimulus. Concrete physiological data is helpful when observing infant behavior, because infants cannot use words to explain things (such as their reactions) the way most adults or older children can.

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