Universality of Free Fall

Galileo Galilei

I wonder…

Would an object that weighs 10X more fall 10X faster?

If you had a golf ball and a bowling ball, and dropped them from a high building, which one do you think would land first?

Galileo Galilei was an Italian mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. About four hundred years ago (1630) -- or so the story goes – he started dropping things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa…

He dropped objects of different weights, sizes, and materials- Cannon balls, musket balls, gold, silver and wood.

He wanted to find out which objects fell faster. Which objects do you think landed first?

Galileo Galilei found that all the objects hit the ground at the same time, no matter how heavy they were!

...and so he made a big discovery: gravity places the same amount of force on all objects, regardless of how heavy they are (mass) or what they are made of (composition).

Nowadays this is called "Universality of Free Fall" or the "Equivalence Principle”.

If I drop a book or a piece of paper, which do you think would

land first?

Air resistance (like a parachute)

Experiment Time!