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Originally Posted by saadie
Do heavier objects "fall" faster?
well ... as i see it .. not being a dork and all ...
heavier objects acclerate to terminal velocity faster then lighter objects .... 
that is if you take out wind speed drag coefficients and shit .... like you read in the science books back in school " In Perfect Condition " .. |
Nope...terminal velocity is deteremined by the fact that there IS wind resistance (or drag if you like). In the most sterile of conditions, i.e. a vacuum, a 25lb weight and a feather would fall at rates indistinguishable from each other. Now...the argument leveled earlier on in this thread that suggests that if you have two very massive objects exerting gravitational pull on each other, that the rate at which the two closed distance would be substantially greater than an instance in which you had something like a feather and one very massive object is accurate. But with the Earth being as massive as it is (by massive I mean "heavy, exerting gravitational pull"), and everything else that we test being so light, it is unlikely that we would ever be able to see a great deal of difference in the way that anything falls towards the Earth. Thus, following the equations F=GMem/r^2 = m*a and F=GMem/r^2 = Me*a, as posed in Graywolf's post, we arrive at the conclusion (more or less supported empirically) that all objects falling towards Earth experience the same gravitational pull.