During the past few decades, a wide consensus has been reached in the community of science educators that it is almost unimaginable to conduct a quality science education without including the history and philosophy of science in some form in the science curriculum, and this is especially the case for physics education (Matthews 1994). However, in practice one can still find a certain asymmetry between what professional historians and philosophers of science, on the one hand, and science educators, on the other, seem to know about the history and philosophy of science. Thus, for example, in physics textbooks and physicists' popular writings one can often find that the authors, despite their good faith and scientific reputations, not only tend to perpetuate certain stories from the history of physics that professional historians and philosophers of science have long ago identified as myths (Brown 2006), but also that the more famous these historical episodes are the more persistent the myths surrounding them are. One of the quite common stories in the history of physics, widely perpetuated in physics textbooks and physicists' popular writings, is that Aristotle, one of the greatest philosophers of ancient times, was a poor observer of nature and consequently an erroneous thinker about natural phenomena. By referring to original sources, in this paper it is demonstrated that the story has strong mythological elements. (Contains 7 footnotes.)