section_path: History/Antiquity and medieval background/Philoponus and impetus
section_name: Philoponus and impetus
paragraph_text: Philoponus and impetus
  
  John Philoponus, a Byzantine Greek thinker active during the sixth century, found this absurd: the same medium, air, was somehow responsible both for sustaining motion and for impeding it. If Aristotle's idea were true, Philoponus said, armies would launch weapons by blowing upon them with bellows. Philoponus argued that setting a body into motion imparted a quality, impetus, that would be contained within the body itself. As long as its impetus was sustained, the body would continue to move. In the following centuries, versions of impetus theory were advanced by individuals including Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji, Avicenna, Abu'l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, John Buridan, and Albert of Saxony. In retrospect, the idea of impetus can be seen as a forerunner of the modern concept of momentum. The intuition that objects move according to some kind of impetus persists in many students of introductory physics.