Since Aristotle, who provided a sharply defined definition of motion as "change of place" in his Physics, the development of the concepts of space, time, and motion can be closely traced. Through Scholasticism to Copernicus and from him to Galileo, the founder of the method of modern natural science, our problem has undergone various transformations and has experienced a multitude of attempts at solutions. Although Galileo's formulation of the law of inertia, which definitively overcomes the Aristotelian viewpoint, implicitly contains the assumptions of an absolute space and – strictly speaking – also of an absolute time, these assumptions were only explicitly stated by Newton. He added a note to the explanations he prefaced to his principles of natural philosophy, in which he defined the concepts of space, time, and O.