A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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.
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.
IMO, it's okay to have casual conversations without being an expert or researching every post. Redditors' habit of fact-checking everything is honestly tiring. Conversation has other purposes besides education. I think many people are looking more for human interaction than for correct facts.
Right but conversations about science where all parties are wrong and nobody is willing to actually look shit up are completely pointless. It's the exact same problem that caused the situation in the OP in the first place.
These days, everything seems to be made out shit & piss.
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.
If you like novels I highly recommend Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson. It has a moment where Galileo realizes you could "weigh" time, in his experiments with objects rolling down an inclined plane.
Aristotle said so much dumb shit, like he said that women have less teeth and never bothered to check
When accounting for air resistance, heavy objects do fall faster than light ones. They couldn't test in a vacuum back then, they only knew how things work here in Earth's atmosphere.
A similar size chunk of iron and coal would have done the experiment just fine. Any two objects of the same shape and size but significantly different densities.
If two objects have the same size and shape, the force applied by air resistance will be the same. However, if two objects have different mass, that same force will result in different acceleration.
They could just drop an empty bs filled wine bottle.
Maybe fill it with mercury (but don’t drink it)
Rosencrantz: [holds up a feather and a wooden ball] Look at this. You would think this would fall faster than this.
[drops them. ball hits the ground first]
...and you would be absolutely right.
~ Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
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
Depends on whether or not you count in air resistance. I was just making a shitpost
Interesting way to admit you were wrong
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 / distance²
But setting mass_1 as Earth's mass and mass_2 as either the feather's or hammer's mass. A higher mass_2 ultimately leads to a higher force of attraction F.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alright, I'm stealing this one for a Pathfinder session
Everything is made all of those in combinations and varied quantities at the molecular level
What if a planet that is Earth-sized falls down on Earth from let's say 5-10 meters though?
Straight to jail.
Do not pass go. Do not collect ~~M~~200
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.
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.