Falling together

One of those “wait, that can’t be true” things that we learn in school physics is when we are taught that both heavier and lighter objects, when dropped simultaneously, should hit the ground at the same time. This is however not so easy to verify as things fall very quickly and there are caveats built in (air resistance will slow down some objects more than others).

Recently, I came across a great illustration of this. Apparently, an astronaut, David Scott demonstrated this experiment with a feather and a hammer on the Moon in 1971.

As an aside, it was thought during the time of this demonstration that the Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere. But now, we believe that there is a wee bit of atmosphere on the Moon. But it is 10¹³ times less dense than that of our Earth.