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.
Like there is a lot of stupidity on reddit but usually someone comes in with actual knowledge
Be careful with that, actually. Reddit mastered repeating an explanation or analogy they read on another thread or saw on YouTube, but being quite eloquent at explaining it. Problem is, if they misunderstood it to begin with, they’ll just as confidently repeat a broken version.
I didn’t notice it at first… then I started seeing explanations for things on my field and cringed at how wrong they were, and then I started noticing the pattern and the very repeated analogies on other areas too.
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.
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.
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
You can find exceptions, but on average, heavier objects will fall very slightly faster than light ones, because they excert their own gravity field onto Earth and therefore pull it towards themselves.
This requires a somewhat unintuitive definition of “falling”, in that both the object and Earth itself moves, but given that any object with mass excerts a gravitational field, there is not actually any other definition.
Wut? This does not turn off gravitational pull for objects other than Earth.
Or I’m misunderstanding what you’re trying to say, but yeah, no clue.
You didn’t read it, it is literally telling you you are wrong.
By experimenting with the acceleration of different materials, Galileo Galilei determined that gravitation is independent of the amount of mass being accelerated
“… in a uniform gravitational field all objects, regardless of their composition, fall with precisely the same acceleration.”
What is now called the “Einstein equivalence principle” states that the weak equivalence principle [above] holds
Tests of the weak equivalence principle are those that verify the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass. An obvious test is dropping different objects and verifying that they land at the same time. Historically this was the first approach – though probably not by Galileo’s Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment[19]: 19–21 but instead earlier by Simon Stevin,[20] who dropped lead balls of different masses off the Delft churchtower and listened for the sound of them hitting a wooden plank.
Between 1589 and 1592,[1] the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (then professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa) is said to have dropped “unequal weights of the same material” from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass
Newton measured the period of pendulums made with different materials as an alternative test giving the first precision measurements.[3] Loránd Eötvös’s approach in 1908 used a very sensitive torsion balance to give precision approaching 1 in a billion. Modern experiments have improved this by another factor of a million.
Experiments are still being performed at the University of Washington which have placed limits on the differential acceleration of objects towards the Earth, the Sun and towards dark matter in the Galactic Center.[45] Future satellite experiments[46] – Satellite Test of the Equivalence Principle[47] and Galileo Galilei – will test the weak equivalence principle in space, to much higher accuracy.[48]
With the first successful production of antimatter, in particular anti-hydrogen, a new approach to test the weak equivalence principle has been proposed. Experiments to compare the gravitational behavior of matter and antimatter are currently being developed.
Ah, I’m not saying there’s a different force being applied to feather vs. hammer. The meme above doesn’t mean that they “fall faster” in the sense that the hammer falls at a higher velocity. It’s rather colloquial usage of “faster” to mean “finishes sooner”. Because what does happen, is that the hammer collides sooner with Earth, since the hammer pulls the Earth towards itself ever-so-slightly stronger than the feather does.
I guess, for this to work, you cannot drop hammer and feather at the same time in the same place, since they would both pull Earth towards themselves with a combined force. You need to drop them one after another for the stronger pull of the hammer to have an effect.
So, this is also going off of this formula:
F = G * mass_1 * mass_2 / distance²But setting
mass_1as Earth’s mass andmass_2as either the feather’s or hammer’s mass. A highermass_2ultimately leads to a higher force of attractionF.So in that equation, let’s say mass 1 is earth. G and distance will be equal in both instances of dropping.
Rewrite equation:
Distance^2/ G*mass 1 = mass 2 /force
And
Distance^2/ G*mass 1 = mass 3 /force
Therefore,
Mass 2 /force = mass 3 /force
F = m*a
Mass 2 / mass 2*a = mass 3 / mass 3 * a
This cancels out to show that a = a, their acceleration is the same.
Depends on whether or not you count in air resistance. I was just making a shitpost
Interesting way to admit you were wrong
Try dropping your phone from a hot air balloon and see which one hits the ground first.
Let’s argue “what in heavy” before we go there
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.
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.
TBF it took awhile to work out vacuum chamber technology, and some people did throw some spherical stuff off the tower of pisa at one point.
Did you know that two identical triangles are identical to each other
It’s how Arthur fell faster then Fenchurch. He was heavier.
The four phases of matter! Solid liquid gas and plasma!
What if a planet that is Earth-sized falls down on Earth from let’s say 5-10 meters though?
A thing that size would have initial velocity to begin with,
But acceleration does not depend on mass, (which is kinda weird from an earthling’s perspective), which Einstein formalized in an amazingly powerful theory called General Relativity
It would fall at 2g, because two Earth-sized masses attract each other in that case. With smaller objects it’s just 1g, because the mass of, let’s say, a nice cup of tea is negligible compared to the mass of Earth.
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.
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
Hey buddy! I came to post that video!
I know what is happening. I know why it is happening. My brain is still screaming at the feather to slow down.
I can’t tell if this is you chastising me or giving me a shovel to help me dig.
Lol I think it’s the research you were missing and I already had the link copied. Wasn’t being a jerk for once, just was giving you info
all good then, thank you :)
Everything is made all of those in combinations and varied quantities at the molecular level
Something something friction
