Galileo Galilei: The Leaning Tower Of Pisa

Galileo Galilei was an italian scientist. He performed a famous experiment that proved mass has no effect on the acceleration of a free falling object. His results disproved a famous theory by Aristotle and is still a major point of discussion and experimentation today. Aristotle thought that when you drop two things with different masses that the heavier one would hit the ground first, his theory of gravity states that objects fall at speed relative to their mass. . Galileo found that the mass of an object does not affect how quickly it accelerates due to gravity. In 1589, Galileo had dropped two balls of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass. Galileo

was performing experiments at the very beginning of his investigations into motion, and he took his experimental results seriously. Over the next two decades he changed his ideas and refined his experiments, and in the end he arrived at the law of falling bodies which states that in a vacuum all bodies, regardless of their weight, shape, or specific gravity, are uniformly accelerated in exactly the same way, and that the distance fallen is proportional to the square of the elapsed time. Galileo correctly reasoned that when an object falls more slowly, it is due to air resistance. An object moving solely under the influence of gravity is said to be in free fall; near the surface of the Earth such an object falls at an acceleration of 9.8 .
If you drop a brick and a feather at the same time the brick will probably hit the ground first. This is because of differences in the amount of friction between these objects and the air around them, not because their masses are different. If there were no air, the feather and the brick would hit the ground at the same time.