 For almost 2,000 years the dominant ideas of how things move came from Aristotle and he described two kinds of motion. He described natural motion and violent motion. Now the natural motion of something was what it would do if it was left to its own devices and there were five kinds of things in the universe according to the Aristotelian point of view. So the idea was that everything below the moon was made up of the four elements earth, air, fire and water and they all had a natural motion that was at rest just still and on the ground. So the earth would be in the bottom then the water then fire then air and the idea was that the aether made up everything that was in the night sky so stars planets the sun all those kinds of things and then natural motion was to move and stay in the sky and then violent motion was everything that you would do to make something behave against its natural motion. So for example if you throw a rock which is mainly made of earth the natural motion is for it to be at rest and on the ground and you have to apply some force to it in order to make it move. Now I don't want to go into enormous detail about Aristotelian physics because all of it is wrong but it doesn't look so wrong at first glance. So for example it's hard to know whether things are made up of earth, air, fire and water or atoms because we haven't seen either of those things and it's hard to know whether things weigh up in the night sky are made of something else because we haven't been there and also this idea of things having a natural motion at rest and on the ground that's incredibly intuitive it's intuitive because all the things I see when I look out my window are at rest and on the ground with the possible exception of a fountain of water and that water is dripping down because it was pumped up there so someone imparted some violent motion to get it up there and then pretty shortly afterwards it's at rest and down in that pool. Look around the room now you probably see a large number of objects and they're probably at rest and sitting on things or on the ground.