Saturday, January 25, 2025

Feathers in a Vacuum



You know from Galileo’s experiment that falling objects will fall at the same speed, no matter their weight. The experiment falls apart when you use feathers, however, because they waft down rather than fall, because of air resistance. But what if you took the air out of the equation?

The  world’s largest vacuum chamber is in Cleveland, Ohio. Physicist Brian Cox visited to show us what a falling feather looks like without any air resistance. The clip is from the BBC Two show Human Universe. (via Metafilter

3 comments:

rikkochet said...

When I was at School way back in the 1950's my teacher proved that Galileo was wrong just by dropping a stone and a piece of paper.
I'm sure Galileo knew that air would slow down a falling object as they had sailing ships in his day,

Anonymous said...

When you do this experiment it is always tempting to use slowed down video to see that they really do fall exactly together. But this can be misleading. They feathers fall at the same speed as the ball, not the other way around.

dan gerene said...

But what if she used a wood ball and a lead ball of the same size?