![]() Without air resistance, both balls would hit the ground after 3.36 seconds. So now, we can take all of these factors into account (and the equations for air resistance are here) and figure out how a 10 lb ball of iron and a 1 lb ball of iron would fare when dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. More surface area also makes it easier to stop, which is why a balled-up piece of paper falls much more quickly than a loose sheet of paper. The baseball will go higher and farther, because the heavier mass makes it harder for the air to stop it. How do you know mass matters? Take a wiffleball and a baseball of approximately the same size, and throw them at the same speed. Air resistance depends on a few things:įor dropping a 1 lb ball and a 10 lb ball of the same material off of this tower, the major differences are the mass and surface area of the ball. If we want to get an accurate model, we need to take into account air resistance in addition to gravity. In real life, we're dropping these balls from a great height (55 meters), and they're falling through air, not a vacuum. If you did, what you'd find is that, as long as you drop them from rest at the same time, they will fall at exactly the same rate, and hit the ground at the same exact time.īut in real life, this is not what happens. Perhaps you'll neglect air resistance, friction, the Coriolis forces, wind, horizontal motions, updrafts, and only consider gravity. Perhaps you'll make the simplest model, and say that the only thing that matters is gravity. Specifically, I wrote about Galileo's famous problem, where you take two cannonballs, one that's 10 lbs and one that's 1 lb, and drop them simultaneously off of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, about 55 meters up. Take the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for instance. ![]() ![]() One of the toughest things to do in science is to figure out - of all the things that exist in the world - is which ones are relevant to your problem. ![]()
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