PPT Slide

Sometimes “obvious”

models can be deceiving

For thousands of years, people thought that

“heavier objects always fall faster”

because many everyday

uncontrolled observations confirm this

However,

several hundred years ago

Galileo did a series of

rigorous experiments

and demonstrated that,

at a fundamental level,

objects with different

masses actually fall at

the same rate

in a gravity field!

But air resistance complicates the problem

and makes it appear untrue some of the time

The Theory shows that “masses

fall at the same rate in a gravity field”.

Air resistance must be modeled and

added as a “feature” to the fundamental

Theory (we will talk about this more later

in the quarter)

What if we did the experiment on the moon

where there is no air?

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