Naïve physics
untrained human perception of basic physical phenomena
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 is characterized by a mostly intuitive understanding humans have about objects in the physical world. Certain notions of the physical world may be innate.
Examples
Some examples of naïve physics include commonly understood, intuitive, or everyday-observed rules of nature:
What goes up must come down
A dropped object falls straight down
A solid object cannot pass through another solid object
A vacuum sucks things towards it
An object is either at rest or moving, in an absolute sense
Two events are either simultaneous or they are not
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.
Psychological research
The increasing sophistication of technology makes possible more research on knowledge acquisition.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Naïve physics” is untrained human perception of basic physical phenomena. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Naïve, physics and untrained, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6983596. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1905.
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This entry incorporates text from “Naïve physics” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.