FREE FALL EXPERIMENT

1. Hold on the tip of the fingers of different hands a coin and a paper disc about one meter or more
above the floor. Drop both of them simultaneously. The coin will reach the floor before the paper disc.
From this experiment is possible to conclude mistakenly that heavier objects fall faster.

2. Mount the paper disc on the coin and drop them together. Both objects will reach the ground at the
same time. The meaning of this experiment is that not the amount of mass causes falling bodies to fall
faster or slower but the resistance/friction of air because air resistance is applied here only to the coin
and not to the paper disc and by that we can infer that air resistance and not the amount of mass
prevented the paper disc from falling faster - the same as the coin.

To exclude the possibility that the coin and the disc of paper attract each other you can show that they
do not stick together in any position.

Experiments 1 and 2 are adopted from:

Weiss Moshe, Physics by Experimental Demonstrations, vol II, Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1968, pp. 208-209

3. Repeat experiments 1 and 2 with different combinations of materials, mass or shape in a vacuum
chamber (if your school has one). All the dropped objects from the same height will fall at the same rate,
whatever their mass because there is no air resistance.

4. Try some experiments with inclined planes and find out if the acceleration is constant? Does the
acceleration depend on the mass and diameter of the rolling body, on the angle of inclination of the
plane, on the distribution of mass of the body, whether the body is a sphere or a cylinder, solid or
hollow? Try to evaluate the effect of friction on your results by using different surfaces for your
experiments. http://collegeofsanmateo.edu/physics/docs/physics250/lab03.pdf

5. The falling bodies experiment could be also experimentally demonstrated by the comparison of
pendulum motions in air with bobs of lead and of cork which have different weight but which are
otherwise similar - the period is independent of the bob weight.