Galilieo Galilei - The Falling Bodies Experiment (1589)

Galilio Galilei’s famous scientific experiment was named the falling bodies experiment, because he had proved that the speed of falling objects was not related to their mass.

Between 1589 and 1592 Galileo had dropped two spheres of different masses from the leaning tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass.

He also discovered through this experiment that the object fell with the same acceleration,  proving that his assumption was true. At the same time he had disproving Aristotle’s theory of gravity, where he had pretended that objects are falling at speed proportional to their mass.

The theory of Galileo was, that lighter objects falling slower than heavier objects due to the air resistance.

Most historians believe that this experiment was rather a thought experminet instead of a physical test.

Experiment:

Galileo did this experiment by using two objects with sphere shape, one cannon ball and one wooden ball. The weight of the wooden ball was the tenth of the weight of the cannon ball. According to the theory from Aristotelian, the cannon ball should be ten times faster, than the wooden ball. So, by the time, when the cannon ball hit the ground, the wooden ball should only have traveled 10 percent of the distance to the ground.

Galileo dropped this two balls off the leaning Tower of Pisa in an attemt to disprove Aristotle's theory and proving his.

The results:

At first the wooden ball fell a bit faster but the cannon ball overtook the wooden ball and was landing slightly before the wooden ball.

So, this experiment could not prove the theory of Galileo, but he took these results and over the next decades he came up with the Law of Falling Bodies.

This states, that in a vacuum all bodies are accelerated in the same way, regardless of their weight, shape or specific gravity.