Do Heavy Objects Actually Fall Faster Than Light Objects? DEBUNKED
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- čas přidán 2. 06. 2023
- Falling objects both fascinate and confuse people the world over. These are the laws of physics that affect our lives everyday, so why is it so hard to understand and why are there so many misconceptions surrounding this topic. We simplify the mind boggling science behind it all so that we can all understand what’s going on. Do all objects fall at the same speed? Do heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones? Experiments in vacuums have muddled the facts when being applied to real world conditions, so let's set the record straight and explain what’s actually going on.
#debunked #funphysics #learnscience
do heavy objects fall faster than light objects?
do heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects?
do heavier objects really fall faster?
does weight affect fall speed?
do more massive objects fall faster?
does heavy or light fall faster?
why do lighter objects fall faster?
why do heavier objects fall slower than lighter objects?
do lighter or heavier objects fall faster?
does weight affect fall speed?
do you fall faster if you are heavier?
what factors affect falling speed?
does weight affect speed?
how does weight affect the rate at which an object falls?
does mass affect the speed of a falling object?
CREDITS:
Stu K - Researcher | Illustrator | Producer | Presenter
Mark W - Researcher | Writer
Ross G - Illustrator | Editor | Animator
Vaia A - Expert Physics Consultant
Andy K - Slow Motion Camera Op
MUSIC CREDITS
Epidemic Sounds
SOURCES
Original research and calculations conducted by Dr Vaia A PhD and Mark W MPhys.
Actually, if you can measure it arcuately enough, the bowling ball will always hit the ground first because it is less affected by atmospheric drag (compared to the force exerted on it by gravity) no matter what height you drop the balls from. The difference will be miniscule from a height of a few meters though.
THIS!!
I knew it!
Thank you ... its sad that people both (a) don't understand that gravity works the same regardless of weight and (b) on any planet with an atmosphere, atmospheric drag should be considered.
Let's take out air completely, if we can measure as accurate at the levels billionth of the width of a proton we will see that the heavier object "hits" the ground first, because a heavier object has its own gravity too which attracts the earth towards it. But of course the difference has no practical meaning.
The question stems from the elimination of the outside factors of such as drag. We know which one hits the ground first. Thats why you can't survive falling from a building but a squirrel can. 1 the squirrel isn't heavy enough to produce a velocity big enough to kill it and 2. The drag on it due to it being so light negates the fall. The question still remains true though, they both fall at the same initial velocity, regardless of any factor. TERMINAL velocity, however, is a different story. But, if both objects fall before reaching terminal, they hit at the same time. That's not up for negotiation.
Thanks, Stu & the rest of the Debunked team! I love seeing new content from you. This is a good one, too.
I enjoyed this, thanks.
Since you already included a brief shot of skydivers, you could also have mentioned that an object that can change the amount of surface area it presents to the air resisting it can influence its freefall velocity. This is exactly what skydivers do in order to catch up to those who have exited the plane before them, and also (more subtly) to stay "on level" with the people they are jumping with.
Just like a flock of birds. Nice.
hey I must say it is a pleasure to stumble on a channel that goes in details about questions that are commonly brushed away with a simple but inexact "well known" answer, I am a mechanical engineer and I'm more and more concerned about the false assomptions that are becoming common in the field so thank you for your great work in explaining these phenomenas !!
You can always go into further detail, like the fact that the stated G will be different than real because noone accounted for Gravity weakening with one over the square of distance. G=M1*M2/R^2. Where R0 is the radius of earth, and object dropped.
@@user-zn4pw5nk2v yes. And the fact that the drag is depending on the velocity is not explicitly said here too. In general it was taken into account here but when he explained the reason for the difference between the steel ball and that heavy blue ball he explained it with a constant force. In fact the drag increases with the velocity. So it is not constant and as the balls get closer to their terminal velocity the difference in the acceleration increases. It is basically a continuous process. All the different forces that contribute to the movement are not really constant but change depending on different factors. The gravity is depending on the mass, which is constant for each ball, and the distance to the ground. However, the distance to the ground doesn't cause a big difference if they are dropped from the same height. It only changes the predicted time until the ball hits the ground. The fact that the drag is depending on the velocity and that this change is much more rapid than the change in gravity is basically the reason why there is a terminal velocity at all. The density of the air is also a factor as he already said at the end of the video.
Bro, I learnt this in detail in primary school ( elementary school if you're American, or under the age of 10)
@@RC-nv6rcmy first when I saw the video title was “didn’t Galileo do that a while back”
Agree. There is more and more stupid in this world and unfortunately much of that is thanks to a bad academic system.
Having said that, this educational video is also built up in a to complicated way and is repetitive. Treating people like they're stupid results in stupid people.
1:30 heavier ball DID hit the ground first even despite being released a bit higher.
Yes.
Yes
Its great to see you implementing real life clips into this video, hopefully we get to see some more irl footage in future videos :)
It's definitely something we're keen to do in future videos, where budgets etc allow. Thanks for watching and commenting!
This is THE explanation of non lab fall physics I needed for at least 10ys, concise, easy to understand, well animated, with some IRL footage ontop - thank you.
well, need is an overstatement, and the reason for it is banal, but still, things that knaw at you in the back of your mind after an argument in reallife and/or online. One of these was about a story where a character could change their weight and through that, among other use cases, fall faster, and a lot(!) of people came along with lab-condition rules to claim its lack of realism, totally ignoring air resistance, terminal velocity etc (not that I could explain that well enough, but the argument always was 'that's negligable' .... now I will lead them here :D )
Glad you found it useful! And I totally get where you're coming from. Thanks for watching and commenting! 👍
I would be curious as to what you mean by the character would be able to fall faster. I know if someone told me about a character that could change their weight and was able to fall faster by increasing their weight I would give the same response that the character wouldn't actually fall faster. However that is because the wording makes it sound like if they increased their weight their acceleration would go beyond 9.81m/s^2 which would be mostly incorrect (Unless the character could increase their mass so much that the acceleration due to gravity increased by a noticeable amount). However if you were explaining it more as the character could increase their mass to reduce the effect of air resistance during their fall making their acceleration stay closer to 9.81m/s^2 for longer then I would agree but again that would only be really noticeable in very long falls and most of the time how the character positions themselves during the fall is going to be the main factor in their air resistance.
If you slow it down you can see the bowling ball start slightly above the basketball and the bowling ball hits the ground slightly before the basketball. And this is before terminal velocity takes affect.
I could counter that thought by saying the bowling ball is smooth and the basketball is not therefore it will create more drag.
In the first situation,(empire state building hight fall, in regular atmosphere) the bowling ball will hit ground first - It's high enough that atmospheric drag would come into play, and I daresay that the basket ball would reach terminal velocity.
However, in a vacuum they'll hit the floor at the same time.
Great video. This channel is so underrated.
Thought before the video: It depends on the hight you drop it from. There are to major forces that work here. One is the gravitation and the other is the air resistance. The gravitational force is constant and dependend of the weight of the droped object. The other gets greater the faster the object falls. At the start both balls accelerate with normal falling acceleration of ~9.81 meter/second². The faster the balls falls the greater is the influence of air resistance and the acceleration slows down. The heavier ball will allways be faster if droped in the atmosphere but the difference gets unrecognisable at low hights.
If dropped in a vacuum they always hit , air resistance plays a part without it
Or how good your camera is
One other way to think about it is that the speed of the ball is impacted by two forces - 1) The downward force of gravity 2) The upward (backward) force required to push the air out of the way. These forces cause an acceleration by Newton's Law rewritten as a=F/M. Since the force due to gravity is Fg-Mg them the acceleration caused by gravity is the same for all objects a=Fg/M=Mg/M=g. This is not true for the acceleration caused by the air. That force is not affected by the mass of an object but only its speed and air resistance so since a=F/M, if you increase the mass of the object then the acceleration will decrease and since that acceleration is upward (backward) the object will fall faster. The velocity when this value is the same as the acceleration due to (g) is the terminal velocity since at that point the two accelerations cancel each other out and the object will stop accelerating (its velocity will stop changing).
the balls don't accelerate at a constant rate. as the velocity increases, the air resistance increases, so the ball's acceleration gradually decreases until it hits 0.
TL:DR Q: "Does gravity exist" A: "Yes."
B. Not No
C. Don't forget air resistance!
No we are running out of gravity.
D. It's all a simulation
D: sir Isaac Newton invented it
Best explanation I’ve seen the the topic. Well done
The bowling ball "does" fall faster. It's just that "falling" is actually two objects coming together, and it's the total mass of the two objects coming together that determines how fast the objects approach eachother.
In either case, the "object 1" weighs either 0.3 lbs for the basketball and about 12 lbs for the bowling ball. The second object for determining speed in either case is THE EARTH, which is about 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lbs.
The speed difference between two objects attracting with a combined mass of 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,012 lbs vs a combined mass of 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.3 lbs is not very different, so "the same" for practical purposes.
1:34 how can i achieve this situation ( what is the proccess to get this type of situation 😅)
When analyzing the forces on a moving ball, if we assume both balls are at the same speed, we can see that for a light ball, the air resistance is large relative to its gravitational force, while for a heavy ball the drag is small compared to the gravitational force.
Because of this, drag has a much larger effect on a lighter object, and a heavier object will always accelerate faster and reach higher speeds than a light ball when falling through a fluid.
Perfect! I was happy to see that the interesting effect of the air resistance and terminal velocity was not walked around. This is the complete story.
Great that you've filmed your own stuff too on this one!
Thanks, we hope to do it more in future videos - budgets depending.
Without needing to watch this:
In case there isn't a big big big difference in mass between towards the same gravitational center falling objects from the same "height" (distance), they fall at the same speed. The amount of time they need to hit the ground can be various due to the different aerodynamical properties of the falling objects and therefore depending on the resistance of the medium they are falling 2 which can create different types of momentum (water, air..). Following the kind of chemical materials these objects influence falling time aswell, also to mention is the role of electricity, temperature and other forms of influencing energies. The distance between the objects, from where u r looking at them and ur own realitve movement u might observe a difference. Point.
They only fall at an equal rate when falling in a vacuum. Once atmosphere is introduced to the experiment, multiple factors then come into play, leading to the bowling ball landing before the basketball does if dropped from a sufficient height.
In a much longer drop, say from 2000 feet, the basketball will hit it's V max much sooner than the bowling ball due to air resistance. From a short drop the difference might be in fractions of milliseconds and would depend on very precise release.
Check out the part from 11:00 onwards
What objects do you have close to hand to test this out right now?
My balls
Working on Wind Turbines, I could chose from a variety of heavy tools to drop down - for science:P
@@Kezenmacher Sounds like a cool job!
I could drop a few cats from the top of my house. The question I have is, will they land on their feet?
@@diyeana aha sounds like a new Debunked in the making! Thanks Melissa 👍
At first I was like meh I know this subject quite well. Then I was like ok that’s something new. Great video.
So what might be the fastest an object move due to gravity after being dropped? For example a one ton lead filled aerodynamically stable arrow or dart dropped from the space station.
This is actually something under development as a weapon. I think it's called "arrow from god" or "project thor", something like that. Don't remember what speed they would reach, but it's stupidly fast, and has a massive amount of kinetic energy.
To get more clear differences just repeat that experiment with two balloons of identical size and shape, one filled with air and the other filled with water. Dropping height of 1 meter will be enough.
Going back to the penny drop... What if the balls were the size of the penny (albeit spherical)? The mass is greatly reduced and therefore the air resistance. With that in mind, I would like to think the terminal velocity would be achieved much faster for even the heaviest.
The best science channel on youtube, Veritasium, made a video called "How dangerous is a penny dropped from a scyscraper?" which you might find interesting.
Was expecting you would include the Apollo 15 demonstration with the hammer and feather.
From 1:31 you can see the bowling ball is slightly higher when released. Yet the frame on 1:34 shows the bowling ball hit at the same time. This means the heavier ball was traveling faster not at the same speed. Yes this is due to air resistance but that was not mentioned at the time.
1:30 What's up with the weird cut where the balls are way further of each other but then much closer when hitting the ground? 😂
Lol, you’re the only one to have mentioned it but it bothered the hell out of me in the edit! Bad planning between the wide and close up shots, budget didn’t stretch to 2 slow mo camera 🤷♂️ Thanks for watching and commenting though 👍
What if we drop a ball the weight of 10 suns (say some dense stuff like a neutron star) and a basketball.. which will hit Earth first?
That ball would not drop. The Earth would drop to the ball ;-). The basketball would not fall to earth but to the superheavy ball. Earth as we know it and the basketball would be obliterated.
There is a moment where you drop the balls and they fall at the same rate.they all get to a certain point where all 3 of them fall equally untill air resistance and acceleration affects them.physics is a bit strange of a thing but the video explains it way way better than schools will ever
this video in 12min taught me what my uni physics professor couldn't in multiple 2.5hr classes/labs
Before watching the video, if there is no wind resistance... both same time. If wind resistance, the heavier one hits first
I tried to tell my teacher not to wake me while I'm sleeping in class because "I'm an object at rest and objects at rest tend to stay at rest" but it didn't work 😂
They tend to stay at rest if not acted upon by external forces ;)
A couple of bonus mathematic statements would have rounded this up nicely.
Like drag is velocity squared. How to calculate terminal velocity etc
That’s why parachutes don’t work on the moon despite having low gravity. Air resistance can also generate heat if objects fall at a much greater height such as a meteor which falls to earth at the minute it enters our gravitational pull.
At 4.00 two objects falling in a vacuum; in theory the object with the greatest mass (the ball) will fall to the ground faster (than the feather) in a vacuum. The time difference between the ball and feather couldn't be measured/observed in practice because it is so infinitesimally small.
If dropped one at a time so that they can't effect each other the heavier object will hit in less time. The only reason it's not apparent with bowling balls is their negligible mass compared to the Earth. For example if it were a case of dropping a bowling ball and a neutron star then the latter would hit first because the Earth would rapidly fall towards it too.
Interesting point, but any situation extreme enough for that to be significant would likely deform the shape of the planet prior to the drop, which I think would actually lower the surface gravity of the planet. Though I’d have to think about this some more.
@@LeTtRrZ I suppose that my point is that although the bowling ball's attraction of the Earth is so small that it's probably less than the width of a proton it's still there, the Earth would still move and by more than with the feather. The reason I suggested dropping each individually is that otherwise it's much like taping the objects together, Earth is being pulled in the same direction by the combined mass of both if dropped together. There's also the point that rather than the objects falling towards the Earth, they and the Earth both fall towards their barycentre, which given the difference in sizes is somewhere very near to the Earth's centre of gravity. It depends on how picky you want to be but tiny effects are still real even if barely significant
To be honest I would love more lessons about physics
Thanks for the explanation!
Glad it was helpful! Thanks for watching and commenting 👍
The bowling ball will land first, because it has a smooth/polished surface, so will be less effected by the atmosphere, on the Moon they would both land at the same time, although the Moon does have a minuscule atmosphere that's leached from the rock.
I waited 15 years for this. Finally a relief.
With or without air resistence?
Which do you think will hit the ground first?
At the same time. A simple thought experiment demonstrates this. Imagine a light object tethered to a heavy one. If they fell at different speeds would the lighter one cause the heavier one to fall more slowly or would it cause the lighter one to fall faster?
Hence a contradiction. So they must fall at the same speed.
Edit. The last experiment demonstrates I hadn't taken air resistance into account. 🤦🏻♂️
The gravity rule only holds in a room with no air, i.e. with no resistance against the falling body. The difference is obvious, if the experiment is carried out in water.
Important calculation is whether the ball will hit the ground before Empire State building security can catch you.
😆 indeed!
All I know for sure is if you drop a 5-6 week old kitten [onto a pillow, from asafe height], it will land feet first.
What if in theory I had a really really tall vacuum chamber and I drop a heat resistance ball from the top, can it reach the speed of light?
The only thing that would affect it are things like air resistance or wind with very heavy vs light objects. or shapes due to the wind.
But its Meter / second ^ 2 mass doesn't come into it AT ALL.
Commenting before watching ... I think they'd hit the ground at the same time if dropped in a vacuum... but with wind resistance affecting a basketball more than a bowling ball, over a high drop, the basketball may skew more to the side and take longer to drop.
So what I got from this video was 1) Ah ha! they actually hit the ground at the same time because the heavier one has more inertia therefore the stronger force pulling down on it balances out with that inertia to get the exact same acceleration, 2) Well actually they don't hit the ball at the same time and the reason for that is because the heavier one has more inertia.
I would argue, the bowling ball also would hit the ground first vs the basket ball, giving a longer distance..ie, more time.
I know that in a vac they'll fall the same, but air resistance slows the lighter object slightly
They both accelerate at the same rate but one got a higher terminal velocity. Also air resistance is a thing and will affect more the lighter/larger object. Didn't watch, tell me i'm right.
If you remove air resistance there is another factor to consider. The object the balls are falling towards. The steel basketball, having a higher mass than the normal basketball also has a higher gravity in itself. Therefore, if they were dropped from the same height from opposite sides of, lets say the moon. The steel ball would still fall faster (at least relative to the moon itself), albeit by a potentially immeasurable amount, as the moon falls ever so slightly towards the steel ball and away from the basketball. Of course if they are dropped side by side, this difference would be even closer to impossible to measure, since the relative movement to the side will have a far less appreciable effect.
Sir, but acceleration due earth is constant and independ of mass - galileo
Applies in a vacuum. A human has terminal velocity of about 120mph, an ant has a terminal velocity of about 4mph.
If there is air or any other gas wind resistance will make the lighter one slower. Difference might be too small to see but if you meassure accuratly enough or make the difference big enough you will see it. Try an air filled balloon and a ball and see if you can see a difference...
A squirrel can be droped from any height and survive. They reach terminal velocity within the height of a tree they jump off and live. So any height above that doesn't matter. If you drop it from a plane it will fall to the ground in survivable speed. It is its own paracute.
Best explanation ever!. Thks
Could you make a video about which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of bricks. Because I feel like if you gather a pound of feathers, the air in between the feathers will add to the weight. But not sure if that can be debunked. Or maybe if its 100 pounds of bricks VS 100 pounds of feathers, might it then have a difference?
There’s definitely something in that idea 🤔 We’ll have a think about it, thanks for commenting and watching 👍
@@DebunkedOfficial Or instead of feathers switch to cotton. It's probably easier to see if the air makes a difference on regular cotton vs compressed cotton
Which is taller? A 5 foot stack of bricks or a 5 foot stack of feathers?
@@arothmanmusic equal, because length measurements are still. Meanwhile weight & velocity measurements can be affected by air, pressure, and a few other elements like shown in this video
It is important to distinguish weight versus mass. A kilogram (mass) of helium (at ambient atmospheric pressure) has negative weight.
"But the kilogram of feathers is lighter..."
-- a confused Limmy
😆
This gets interesting once you consider buoyancy due to air, and if you actually "know" that the two objects do have the same _mass_ , vs. merely the same _apparent weight_ in air.
@@sternmg so it's not so confusing, the high surface area and lower density of the feathers in comparison to steel produces a lightening effect because of buoyancy.
ýes its true that the weight doesnt effect how fast something is dropping but the air resistance does. becausse the bowling ball is smaller it automaticly makes it the object that will hit the ground first if let go off at the exact same time, dropping it by hand from 2 meters high while cutting the final drop multiple times is the most unscientific way to show it
Why complicate that much?
The one that will hit the ground first is the one with less air drag, doesn't matter the weight. Given the time and velocity necessary for it to get in action.
and then, even if there was no atmosphere, we would have to consider that bowling ball has stronger gravitational field than basketball and will pull the earth stronger, so relatively to the earth a bowling ball would still reach the ground a bit faster then a basketball even though there's no air
If mass attracts mass, why wouldn't the object with more mass get pulled down to earth faster?
a = g - Drag/m, Drag dependes on velocity only for the same shapes. Smaller mass m larger Drag/m. That's why lighter ball comes last.
I like this man intonation - it is full of science pasion.🙂
given enough Distance the lighter Object will slow a touch, a drop of a few dozen feet, or many even 200 feet may not show much difference
The terminal-velocity of the basketball is much lower than that of the bowling ball. You gotta' take them higher to get a decent test and expose this. Anyhow, it isn't "heavier-versus-lighter", it's which one is more aero-dynamic. If they're the same shape, then the one that's *denser* ... not heavier.
Increase the size of the balls until one is the size of Jupiter and the other is the size of Earth. Release them separately and measure the time of takes.
The Jupiter ball will hit the The ground faster. It attracted Earth in it's direction. Using a single frame of reference, it fell faster
Isn't it misleading to ask whether or when an object "reaches its terminal velocity"? The time would depend on the precision with which you can measure or calculate the speed. I think no object ever actually reaches it, they're just getting closer and closer all the time, while their acceleration becomes smaller and smaller. Their speed asymptotically approaches the terminal velocity but never actually becomes equal to it. The acceleration changes all the time, since the air resistance is a function of speed.
You would have to define what you mean by "reaching" the terminal velocity. If you want to calculate a well defined point in time, you could say you consider it to be reached when the speed is smaller than the terminal velocity by some margin, say 1m/s, or 0.001m/s or whatever.
Technically the heavier one is also pulling on the earth by an infinitesimally stronger amount than the lighter one, making it *technically* faster by a tiny, tiny, tiny, amount. But for the sake of simplicity, yes,it is the same.
Question about finding the heavier object's terminal velocity: Why not instead of increasing the height, you just start with a greater initial velocity like -100m/s at t=0 instead of 0m/s at t = 0?
We don't live in a vacuum, so asking a general question without any other specifics, logically, a bowling ball with hit the ground faster than a feather.
people always say that things fall at the same speed due to gravity being the same.. and my science teacher in college always stated this too.. but what he failed to explain is how everything is 1g all the time? if 2 earth size planets fall towards each other, isnt that 2g? what id say just from using my brain is that a heavier object is actually falling faster towards the earth than a lighter object.. its just that the difference between the earth and the heavy object is so huge compared to the difference between the light object and the heavy object that its barely noticeable...
1g versus
0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001g versus 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002g
it looks like they are hitting at the same time...
im guessing if you drop a planet with half the mass of the earth towards the earth and one with the same mass of the earth towards the earth, the 1g planet will arrive 1.5 times as quick
The two object will have different terminal velocity so if you drop it the a high enough height you should see a different.
At slow speeds in short distance drops the slower falling lighter object has little time to accumulate distance errors from falling in a vacuum speeds. Change to a much higher drop, say from the Golden Gate bridge, and terminal velocity for the two objects will be different as the speed stops increasing when the wind force equals the accelerating force of gravity.
Care to try it gain from the roof of a 6 story parking structure? People that skydive are very familiar with terminal velocity for a human body falling between 140 and 200 MPH depending on the wind profile.
which will reach the terminal velocity first ? lighter object or heavier
heavier objects just fall more forcefully meaning wind or other obstacles make less difference so they actually fall a bit faster in the nature but in a vacuum they fall just as fast as a light object
In a vacuum and with perfectly accurate measurements and if you test both objects separately, the heavier object will hit the ground, ever so slightly, in less time. Because the heavier object curves space time more than the lighter object. So the earth moves up in that curved space time towards the heavier object. Even if it’s a miniscule amount.
Another thought experiment would be to think of dropping a 100kg uranium ball and a 5 gram ball on a 1000kg asteroid. The 100kg uranium ball will assert some gravitational influence on the asteroid and therefore fall faster than the 5 gram ball.
08:25f
The 2 heavier balls won't accelerate at the same rate but the heavier ball will accelerate at a higher rate long before the middle ball reaches its terminal velocity.
5:32 since the two forces pushing up and pulling down are equal at terminal velocity, imagine a world where you would just float in the air, unable to move until acted upon by another force.
Good to see stu back!
Thank you Someone On The Internet
Pretty much what I expected, but good to get some of the concepts discussed in detail.
What you expected is wrong. They can’t reach their terminal velocities from that height
I tried using chat GPT to answer the same questions. Taking to account the same parameters it came out with different answers. Why?
It's so weird seeing Stu in a t-shirt. Kind of like seeing your uncle without his token beard.
😆 I don’t actually remember why, but my animated character has always had a white t-shirt on, so I thought I should go with continuity and match as we were bringing the experiment to life. I hope it didn’t ruin it for you? Thanks for watching and commenting! 👍
When an object falls down kinetic energy comes in place and in it 1/2mv² which is directly proportional to mass
I learned that I would rather drop feathers on my foot than a bowling ball.
No, they do not. Air will slow the basketball down, not gravity. Galileo already figured this out hundreds of years ago, and David Scott during the Apollo 15 mission proved it when he dropped a hammer and a feather on the moon and they hit at the exact same time.
In fact, it takes gravity a while to act on objects of higher mass, so it might not be calculable, but that feather probably wants to hit first.
Where is the practical test with this building ??
Would depend on if the basketball hits it's terminal velocity before reaching the ground from being dropped from such a height. I'm fairly sure the basketball would if dropped from the top of the Empire state building, so the Bowling ball would hit first, unless the bowling ball is a very light variant with a subsequently low terminal velocity. Now if you are asking which would hit first in a vacuum with no air resistance, the answer would be neither or both since they would fall at the same rate without slowing down due to air resistance.
Very good but incomplete. let's says I add a fourth ball of a *mass* of 1g. I really means 1 gram of mass. A typical basket ball volume is 7 liter (yes, I checked twice, r=1.19 dm =>7 liter ). So filled with helium, 1 bar at 20°C , 0.1g / liter we have 0.7 gram, plus 0,3 gram of rubber => 1g.
But the density of air 1bar / 20°C is 1.2 g /liter, so 7 liter of air is 7* 1,2 = 8,4g.
So the 4th balloon got a Archimedian up force of 0.0084 * 9.81 N , and a gravitational force of 0.001 * 9.81 N-> *it goes up!*
All of that to explain that archimedian force is here too.
If we want to be perfectly exact, we need to be careful with the term *weight* . Because the real definition of the weigth is "on the location of experience, the *force exerced by the still object on the ground* ". And this is *not* exactly equivalent of "the force of gravity exerced by the planet on the object".
For example, the weight at Quito is the result of 3 forces:
- the gravitational attraction of the earth on the object
- the centrifugal force created by the earth rotation (it is not so small, at the equator 0.03 m/s², nearly 0.3% of the gravity)
- the Archimedian force
So, in the air, 1kg of lead is heavier than 1kg of feather. Because the net volume of 1kg of feathers is bigger than the volume of the lead, so the archimedian force is bigger.
To effectively measure that, you have either to measure the 2 masses in the vacuum, or to measure the mass by it's inertia, not by weigth. :D
There is even one other factor in your experience. It is coriolis effect. It will not measurably change the time of fall, but it may measurably offset the location on the ground.
I'm actually more confused than i was before watching this.. thank you!!
yeah lol same like first half: yeah yeah got it, second half: what?
In vacuum everything falls at the same speed. As simple as that. There was a little bit of a popular science demo when one of the Apollo astronauts on the moon dropped a hammer and (i think) a feather and they fell at the same speed..... and that's not because of 'the moon' but because of 'the vacuum'.
the force with which the bowling ball hits the ground is so much greater than the basketball, so be sure and don't drop a bowling ball on your foot :)
This is grade school science. Depends on the distance. On Earth (or really anywhere with atmosphere and gravity) the answer is the heavier object hits first. In a vacuum (anywhere with gravity) they hit at the same time. I don't need to watch the video to know this just pay attention in Mrs Slaughter's science class. Yes, this is an oversimplification, there are other factors involved. For a basketball and a bowling ball you need some time and distance for the difference to really be observable, and dropped from a short enough distance the difference between a vacuum and in an atmosphere is effectively negated. As until terminal velocity is achieved, they will be falling with the same acceleration and thus at the same rate. A bowling ball and a bit of paper will hit at the same time in a vacuum, in an atmosphere, the paper will hit terminal velocity almost instantly. However all still grade school science.
We have proven by Boyd Bushman that 2 magnets forced together on opppsite sides will fall slower than a rock of the same size and weight, effectively negating what we call gravity...
"dont do this at home" ok then imma just go outside onto my house