At the time people thought objects fell at a rate proportional to their mass. So a heavy object would fall faster.
Galileo worked out this wasn’t true, and proved it by dropping two cannon balls from the leaning tower of Pisa; one solid, one hollow. There was a significant difference in mass, but they both fell at roughly the same rate. Or possibly he just described doing that but never actually did it, nobody is entirely sure.
Why does this work? Because that’s how physics works. Two people jumping off a cliff independently vs two people jumping off holding hands. They won’t fall faster just because they are now one heavier object.
We usually think light objects fall slower because aerodynamic drag effects them more, giving them a lower terminal velocity, but if you remove air, everything on earth would accelerate towards the earth at 9.81 meters per second per second, because thats the strength of earths gravity.
Suppose that it’s true that heavier objects fall faster.
If I take two stones, a lighter one and heavier one, and tie them together, then the heavier stone will be slowed down by the lighter one and the lighter one will be pulled faster by the heavier one. Thus the speed of two stones together would be somewhere between the speed of the lighter one and the speed of the heavier one.
However, the two stones tied together have more mass than each individual stone and this object should therefore fall even faster than the heavy stone. We have reached a contradiction.
Comments
At the time people thought objects fell at a rate proportional to their mass. So a heavy object would fall faster.
Galileo worked out this wasn’t true, and proved it by dropping two cannon balls from the leaning tower of Pisa; one solid, one hollow. There was a significant difference in mass, but they both fell at roughly the same rate. Or possibly he just described doing that but never actually did it, nobody is entirely sure.
Why does this work? Because that’s how physics works. Two people jumping off a cliff independently vs two people jumping off holding hands. They won’t fall faster just because they are now one heavier object.
We usually think light objects fall slower because aerodynamic drag effects them more, giving them a lower terminal velocity, but if you remove air, everything on earth would accelerate towards the earth at 9.81 meters per second per second, because thats the strength of earths gravity.
Suppose that it’s true that heavier objects fall faster.
If I take two stones, a lighter one and heavier one, and tie them together, then the heavier stone will be slowed down by the lighter one and the lighter one will be pulled faster by the heavier one. Thus the speed of two stones together would be somewhere between the speed of the lighter one and the speed of the heavier one.
However, the two stones tied together have more mass than each individual stone and this object should therefore fall even faster than the heavy stone. We have reached a contradiction.