Watch a feather and a bowling ball fall at the exact same speed

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  • To this day, I've never felt dumber than when elementary school me thought that 100 pounds of bowling balls would fall faster than 100 pounds of feathers. This video doesn't show that riddle in action but something even cooler: how things fall at the same rate inside the world's largest vacuum chamber.

    Brian Cox visited NASA's Space Power Facility in Ohio which can suck out 30 tons of air in the giant chamber to remove air resistance and mimic space.

    It's not as cool as dropping items and watching them fall on the Moon (nothing is) but still, it's pretty damn cool.


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  • PFollow javiercd
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  • I did not understand the part where he says that the objects are not falling at the same time since they are not even moving at all (or you couldn't tell they were moving if it wasn't for some kind of reference object like the background.).

    Anyone care to explain?

  • PFollow david-johnson
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  • He is merely stating that, if we were the bowling ball in the video, it would seem as if the feather was not moving at all.

    He is refering to Einstein's theory of relativity, which is much simpler than most people would think. The theory says that all observed movement in the world is measured RELATIVE to the frame of reference (that is, relative to the observer's pointof view and the observer's own movement)

    In this example, ignore background image, and focus only on the observer, and what I am observing.

    Imagine you are standing on the side of a northbound highway, you would observe that cars are going 60 mph north, because relative to your 0mph speed, they are going 60mph northnorth (there is a 60mph difference between our speeds, so in any circumstance, it would seem that the car is going 60mph). NOW imagine you are also driving on the highway north at a slow speed of 40mph, while all other cars go 60mph. From your point of view, it would seem as if all other cars are going 20mph (because the theory states it is their speed RELATIVE to ours). This is because we are measuring other car's speed from OUR POINT OF VIEW. The ground is moving 40mph south from our point of view.

    As yousee, all movement is entirely relative to the frame of reference

  • PFollow phantomlimb
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  • Ok smarty pants, what weighs more a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?

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    • A. Feathers

    • PFollow herezathought
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    • There is no need to feel dumb for that. You have never lived a day of your life in a vacuum, and so as a kid you have no empirical evidence to tell you otherwise. Nor is there a way to intuit gravity.

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    • Where is the Tesseract?


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