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When accounting for air resistance, heavy objects do fall faster than light ones. They couldn't test in a vacuum back then, they only knew how things work here in Earth's atmosphere.
A similar size chunk of iron and coal would have done the experiment just fine. Any two objects of the same shape and size but significantly different densities.
If two objects have the same size and shape, the force applied by air resistance will be the same. However, if two objects have different mass, that same force will result in different acceleration.
While that is true, two properly selected objects (such as the ones mentioned above) can reduce the effect of air resistance to levels negligible to human perception, demonstrating that heavier objects do not intrinsically fall faster.
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The acceleration will be 1G minus drag. The Earth is sufficiently larger than anything one would drop off a tower so the weight of the dropped thing doesn't matter at all
How does your model of the universe explain the hammer and feather dropped on the moon by Apollo 15's David Scott landed at the same time?
Ed. There is an effect of buoyancy that will make denser things fall faster. It becomes noticeable in distances where the dropped items reach terminal velocity or on more dense media where buoyancy is more significant.
In air over short distances buoyancy is negligible, in vacuum there is none
minus drag
On Earth, this is the part that makes it so that objects do not fall at the same speed.
on the moon
This is the type of experiment they could not do 2000 years ago.
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The Earth is ~~sufficiently~~ larger than anything one would drop off a tower that the weight of the dropped thing doesn't matter at all
F=ma.
Two items of the same shape will have the same amount of air resistance. If they have significantly different masses, the two object experience commensurately different accelerations (or reduction in acceleration), even if the force is the same.
If you take a balloon full of tetrahexofluroride (a gas 6x the density of air) and a chunk of iron the exact same size and shape and throw them off a building, I guarantee the iron chunk will hit first.
How does your model of the universe explain the hammer and feather dropped on the moon by Apollo 15's David Scott landed at the same time?
It's called a vacuum, which is famous for not having air resistance. Y'know, the thing we're talking about?
To perform the experiment properly on Earth where there is air resistance, you need to pick a shape and range of masses that minimize the effect of air resistance
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Nope, denser objects fall faster than less dense ones (through the air). Remember: A kilogram of feathers is just as heavy as a kilogram of lead.
I'll still choose to be hit by the feathers.
You'll get hit by what you're told to get hit by and you'll like it.
Nope, denser objects fall faster than less dense ones (through the air).
Technically it's objects with a higher mass-to-drag ratio, but most of the time it's close enough
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I am most certainly not a science whiz but it's so goddamn funny to see this whole comment section full of people just... explaning and correcting each other poorly with varying degrees of correctness. Just like 50 half-true and misremembered tidbits from everyone's intro to high school physics class, blindly seeking targets in space. I promise you guys, there's a very straight answer to this like two or three clicks away, written more clearly and succinctly than anyone here is managing to do.
Don't tell them that. You're contaminating my petri dish. ;)
Lemmy (or most social media) in a nutshell.
I have noticed there is a bit of a more "anti intellectual" bent on Lemmy compared to Reddit. Like there is a lot of stupidity on reddit but usually someone comes in with actual knowledge. On Lemmy I just see people arguing in circles with each other with nobody ever actually looking anything up.
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The thing that always gets me about the Renaissance is Galileo:
He did those experiments with things falling down? Measuring speed?
Yeah. Without a clock.
The theory for how to build those came later, based on what Galileo did.
Man, being a cop must have sucked before they invented time.
Officer: do you know how fast you were going?
Lord: No, do you?
Officer grumbles: you're free to go.
Carriage pulls away
Officer ClocknTime: For now, for now.
Alright, I'm stealing this one for a Pathfinder session
Clocks existed then though. The oldest clocktower in Europe that still exists was built over 100 years before Galileo was born, and time measurement existed longer than that. You can measure time fairly accurately with water clocks which had been known for thousands of years before Galileo. Not having "modern" pendulum clocks yet doesn't mean that they didn't have any way to measure time. Even without water clocks you can get decently reliable measurements of time with rhythmic chants (think how today we might say "one Mississippi, two Mississippi, etc.). Early alchemical recipes often include time measurements in chanting a specific prayer or passage a certain number of times during a specific step. Sure you're not going to get milisecond level accuracy this way but you don't really need that for a lot of things. Hero of Alexandria built mechanical automata 1500 years before Galileo using pulleys and weights as timers. Time measurement not only existed before pendulum clocks, it was pretty decent.
Couldn't even measure it in Mississippis because they hadn't discovered it yet.
https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/how-much-does-a-cloud-weigh
Doing the math: 1,000,000,000 x 0.5 = 500,000,000 grams of water droplets in our cloud. That is about 500,000 kilograms or 1.1 million pounds (about 551 tons). But, that "heavy" cloud is floating over your head because the air below it is even heavier— the lesser density of the cloud allows it to float on the dryer and more-dense air.
Planes, helicopters- lots heavy stuff not falling faster than lighter ones
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Try dropping your phone from a hot air balloon and see which one hits the ground first.
A hot air balloon masses a lot but weighs nothing
Theres a yo' mama joke in there somewhere.
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Rosencrantz: [holds up a feather and a wooden ball] Look at this. You would think this would fall faster than this.
[drops them. ball hits the ground first]
...and you would be absolutely right.
~ Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
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To be fair to Archimedes, heavy objects do usually fall faster than light ones*, and to be fair to Newton, stuff coming towards you usually has a higher relative velocity than things going away from you.+
*You need your objects to be weigh a lot relative to their air resistance to notice otherwise.
+You need some pretty ambitious equipment to detect that electromagnetic radiation such as light does not follow this pattern.
If you like novels I highly recommend Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson. It has a moment where Galileo realizes you could "weigh" time, in his experiments with objects rolling down an inclined plane.
Aristotle said so much dumb shit, like he said that women have less teeth and never bothered to check
With same gravity constance everything fall down at the same speed, but only in a vacuum. In an atmosphere there count the air resistance of an object, even if they are made of the same material and weight, an iron sphere of 1 kg fall faster than a iron sheet of 1 kg.
That's why Gallileo's balls were so special.
With two metal balls, one solid and one hollow, you could rule out the role of resistance?
I assume you mean keeping the outer diameter the same and making one ball lighter than the other. That's clever, it would eliminate aerodynamism as a factor.
However wouldn't results still vary, since hollowing out the metal ball increases its buoyancy ? (Archimedes' principle).
They would have the same coefficient of drag, correct, but the air resistance would end up having more effect on the lighter mass of the hollow sphere, so it would be slightly slower to fall.
Archimedes principle here is accounted for in the different weights. Everything that you can put on a scale is already being acted on by Archimedes principle in air.
~~I mean, yes and no.~~ ~~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity#Physics ~~ ~~Heavier objects have a higher "max speed" that they can fall at, compared to lighter objects. The acceleration to that relative speed is constant though. More or less.~~
~~IE : While a bowling ball and a ping pong ball might start falling at the same initial rate, eventually the bowling ball will fall faster.~~
EDIT : Ignore me for now, I need to do more digging.
In a medium, which is an important distinction
Yeah, it's not like they just blindly accepted what he said. They held up a feather or a leaf or a sheet of paper and a lead weight and dropped them both at the same time and the lead weight hit the ground while the leaf was still fluttering in the wind.
That's not because of weight though. That's just one thing being affected more by air resistance. In a vacuum, there would be no difference. In fact, they did just that during the Apollo 15 mission on the moon using a feather and a hammer:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_15_feather_and_hammer_drop.ogv
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Did you know that two identical triangles are identical to each other
But what about three identical digons?
The four phases of matter! Solid liquid gas and plasma!
These days, everything seems to be made out shit & piss.
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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