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 bitch 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?
This man managed to get a G out of the word “feathers.”
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!
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
Not like we really had the ability to create a large enough vacuum to test it until, as far as human history goes, relatively recently
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.
Funilly enough, I think we still don’t know how some eels mate, so maybe they were on to something
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.
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.
