Makes sense, why test it?
Excuse me, I have to get back to wiping my ass with the communal sponge-on-a-stick.
Don’t forget your lead cookware and lead infused wine!
Makes everything sweeter. And the mental instability is less of a hindrance in times when people were regularly crucified.
I prefer mercy in my wine. If you put enough you won’t remember anything tasting better.
I prefer mercy in my wine.
but mom said it was my turn on the sponge-on-a-stick
Lucretius, writing in 50 BCE:
Whatever falls through water or thin air, the rate Of speed at which it falls must be related to its weight, Because the substance of water and the nature of thin air Do not resist all objects equally, but give way faster To heavier objects, overcome, while on the other hand Empty void cannot at any part or time withstand Any object, but it must continually heed Its nature and give way, so all things fall at equal speed, Even though of differing weights, through the still void.
- De Rerum Natura book 2 lines 230-239
I was literally just writing about him nailing survival of the fittest too.
He’s still arguing that heavy objects would fall faster when dropped anywhere on Earth, though, specifically bringing up air resistance as the reason. His argument is that they would fall at the same rate in a vacuum.
But that’s true, isn’t it? Putting aside volume and shape.
He’s close, but not quite there. Air resistance slows things, and in a vacuum all things will fall at the same rate, yes. But, weight has zero impact on the rate an object falls through the atmosphere. Air resistance affects things based on their shape and permeability. He’s still saying that a heavier object will fall faster in atmosphere, all other things being equal, which is false.
He clearly knows air resistance is a thing, he just doesn’t understand how it works.
Hi. Physicist here. You are absolutely wrong. The mass of an object does not affect the magnitude of force of air resistance which acts upon a falling object. But the acceleration that object will have is given by Newton’s second law as Force divided by mass. So a heavy and a light ball with the same shape will experience the same air resistance, but the heavy ball will “care less” and thus fall faster.
But it does affect the downward force acting on the object. Given two objects of the same shape but with different masses, one will indeed fall slower than the other. This is because the ratio of weight to surface area differs a lot between the two. Here’s a calculator from NASA you can play with, and a relevant passage from the same page:
If we have two objects with the same area and drag coefficient, like two identically sized spheres, the lighter object falls slower. This seems to contradict the findings of Galileo that all free-falling objects fall at the same rate with equal air resistance. But Galileo’s principle only applies in a vacuum, where there is NO air resistance and drag is equal to zero.
https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/termvel/
A ping-pong ball sized lead shot and a ping-pong ball both fall at the same rate though air?
That doesn’t sound right.
That’s because there’s more than just weight that’s different there
Don’t leave dry sarcasm on the Internet without the requisite sarcasm mark, lol, I ain’t gonna removed out and add it now tho
If all things are equal except for mass. Then the object of higher mass will fall faster.
Size and shape are the same. Mass is different. What else?
I don’t think he’s talking about air resistance but about density, which is pretty close to the notion of weight and also affect fall speed. He probably came to this conclusion by looking at how things fall (or not) through water.
When air resistance is in the equation, weight can be a factor. But yes, it should’ve been checked way earlier, but it’s not surprising considering how he’s put on a pedestal.
I read somewhere that Galileo really struggled convincing his patrons go finance such experiments. Science wasn’t concerned with fundamental questions about how the world works until very recently
That’s not necessarily true, they are definitely interested in how the world worked, they just used a very different set of assumptions and methodologies compared to what we use today.
This man managed to get a G out of the word “feathers.”
this idea seems rather tame when you compare it to a bunch of other batshit crazy ideas people were having in ancient greece, like: each time an eel smashes into a rock, a tiny piece of eel breaks off, and then that tiny piece of eel turns into an adult eel and thats how eels are born.
It’s funny how they treated cancer:
Treatment was based on the humour theory of four bodily fluids (black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm). According to the patient’s humour, treatment consisted of diet, blood-letting, and/or laxatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cancer#Early_diagnosis
Nowadays doctors are pretty humourless.
Funilly enough, I think we still don’t know how some eels mate, so maybe they were on to something
Heavy objects, on average, are denser at human scales. Dense objects tend to have an aerodynamic profile compared to sheets of leaves or cloth or sand. They tend to get blown away in the wind. Anything that would bind or compact those lightweight things together like resin or water tends to weigh a sizable percentage of the compound. There is a correlation between heavy and fall speed. It took accurate scales and ~0 bar vacuums to prove it was the air doing it.
Try explaining how a helium balloon works without sounding like a wizard.
They tend to get blown away in the wind
True, but not because of “aerodynamic profiles”. Create a sphere out of lead and one out of styrofoam and the lead one will land first. The real difference is air resistance. Probably the first piece of physics anyone learns is f=ma, and this tells us that with the same force (e.g. the same amount of air in the way when travelling at the same speed), a lighter mass will experience more acceleration (in the case of air resistance, less acceleration in the direction of fall, because of more acceleration in the upwards direction) than a heavier one.
There’s something to the aerodynamic profiles though. Less surface area results in less force being applied. So a flat sheet of paper falls slower than that same sheet crumpled up. The things mentioned are light and have lots of surface area for the wind to apply force to.
In an article published in the journal Leonardo, the researchers draw upon a fresh look at one of da Vinci’s notebooks to show that the famed polymath had devised experiments to demonstrate that gravity is a form of acceleration—and that he further modeled the gravitational constant to around 97 percent accuracy.
GRAVITY IS A GODDAMNED LIBERAL CONSPIRACY!!! WE COULD FLY THROUGH THE AIR ANY TIME WE WANTED!!! DON’T BELIEVE THE LIES SHEEPLE!!!
🇺🇲🦅🎆
“The ancient wisdom.”
How do we know that lots of people didn’t figure this out & then got on with their lives? Because there was no way for them to tell all the other people in the world, we’ll never know, or if they wrote it down it’s been lost, so likewise we’ll never know.
Is hard to imagine what the world was like before mass literacy and mass communication.
Friction would like a word
This is true on earth. If you have objects of the same shape and different weights and you drop them from high enough to reach terminal velocity, the heavier one will have a high terminal velocity through air and reach the ground faster.
The “in a vacuum” thing is where this goes wrong, but I don’t think homeboy really knew about space or vacuums.
no. Gravity is consistently pulling at 9.85m/s regardless of the size or density in an object.
Terminal velocity is reference to the air resistance and buoyancy affect on an object in freefall. This has nothing to do with the mass or size of the object, but it’s air resistance.
https://openstax.org/books/college-physics-2e/pages/2-7-falling-objects
Gravity is (mostly) consistent across the planet and will always pull the same force regardless of the object in question.
Gravity is consistently pulling at 9.85m/s regardless of the size or density in an object.
Any object with mass has gravity
Say the moon was falling to earth
Would the earth not be drawn in space towards the moon as it fell?
The moon and earth would collide at a rate faster than 9.85m/s?
They actually are. The Moon technically doesn’t orbit the earth, but a point near earth, that earth does as well. Its momentum that prevents the moon from crashing to earth, and it’s gravity that prevents it from flying off into space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter_(astronomy)
Because the earth is so much more masive than the moon, the Barycenter of the gravity point is not the centre of the earth itself.
And another interesting fact: The moon’s momentum is slightly greater than that of the earth’s gravity, causing the moon to very very slowly move further away from Earth (About 3.7cm a year).
but it’s these momentums and gravitational forces that keep the moon orbiting (Orbital mechanics is fucking fascinating as fuck)
But what would happen if two bodies collided that are large? The force of impact would be the combined momentum of the two items as you believe. It is believed this is what actually formed our moon as early formation of the planets saw two planet sized bodies impact like you describe, the resulting force spun enough matter to form the moon (Mineral inspection of moon rock shows it contains the same isotopes as earth, which is rare if the moon formed on it’s own).
pint to remember; A bodies gravitational force is based on it’s mass. Larger mass items have more gravitational force. Because fo that, While gravity is 9.85m/s on earth, it would be different on every piece of matter. Even a single atom has it’s own gravity force, albeit very low. Your “gravity” force on the moon is not 9.85 but a speed based on it’s own mass. This is why you would be “heavier” on earth than say the moon or mars, despite your mass not changing. the planetary body mass affects gravity.
ANOTHER fun fact. Gravity and mass affects time as well. Objects closer to a center of mass operate slower than those further away. Satellites for example actually move faster in time than we do on earth. GPS for example overcame this by programming to check real earth time frequently.
You did a google search and just pasted the top link? which is a question about calculating the drag on a falling object.
But you clearly didn’t read the responses, which the first once directly states that the original question misses the premise that it is drag on an object from the atmosphere which causes the affect of different speed. This is the same arugment you made about terminal velocity. It’s the same point. Terminal velocity and the speed slow down of two different objects is still directly related to the atmosphere and it’s affect on an object.
Moreover, after terminal velocity is reached, the object no longer accelerates
While this is true, We circle back to the fact Terminal Velocity isn’t a measure or an affect of mavity but atmospheric influence on the falling object.
Earth Gravity is consistently pulling on the objects of difference mass at the same velocity. given zero resistances, both would hit the same speed.
Not really always, because of buoyancy. A balloon of volume V displaces the same amount of air weather it’s filled with air or lead, but in the former case the force is significant.
