Galileo’s Great Discovery: How Things Fall

Galileo was the first clearly to understand that the forces acting upon objects could be broken into
independent components; that a thrown stone had a force pulling it down as well as the force throwing
it horizontally outward. These insights would be of great use to Isaac Newton, born the year Galileo
died, in devising the calculus and his universal laws of gravity and motion. Galileo’s idea of using an
inclined plane to accurately measure free fall as noted took advantage of his insight that forces act
independently in each dimension, the downward, vertical force on the rolling ball (the gravitational
force) can be analyzed separately from the horizontal force that moves it laterally along the plane. The
movement down the plane is the result of the combination of the downward gravitational force on the
ball and the force of the plane on the ball, acting perpendicular or normal to the plane, resisting it and
deflecting it horizontally. Studying the downward component of the forces acting on the rolling ball,
then, is equivalent (if we disregard the frictional forces acting on the ball) to studying the force drawing
down a freely falling object, where all the forces act downward, in the y direction. This was a
fundamental intuition, and helped lay the conceptual foundation for Newton’s work on the action of
forces, and the concept of vectors.

Using the ramp, however, came with a price .Using an inclined plane introduces a whole new element of
friction into the experiment. Galileo tried to minimize it by covering the plane with parchment. But in
this experiment Galileo was seeking only proportions: the relationship between time and distance of fall.
Even if the ball was retarded by some unknown amount of friction, the relationship between distance
and time after it got going should be affected more or less equally in each interval. Here is Galileo’s
description of his inclined plane experiment, stating his findings regarding the relation between distance
and the time of fall:

A piece of wooden moulding or scantling, about 12 cubits long, half a cubit wide, and three finger-
breadths thick, was taken; on its edge was cut a channel a little more than one finger in breadth; having
made this groove very straight, smooth, and polished, and having lined it with parchment, also as
smooth and polished as possible, we rolled along it a hard, smooth, and very round bronze ball. Having
placed this board in a sloping position, by lifting one end some one or two cubits above the other, we
rolled the ball, as I was just saying, along the channel, noting, in a manner presently to be described, the
time required to make the descent. We ... now rolled the ball only one-quarter the length of the
channel; and having measured the time of its descent, we found it precisely one-half of the former. Next
we tried other distances, comparing the time for the whole length with that for the half, or with that for
two-thirds, or three-fourths, or indeed for any fraction; in such experiments, repeated a full hundred
times, we always found that the spaces traversed were to each other as the squares of the times, and
this was true for all inclinations of the plane, i.e., of the channel, along which we rolled the ball.

Below are some of Galileo’s measured times and distances for the rolling ball as it progressed down the
inclined plane. Galileo used a measuring unit called points, each of which was about 29/ 30 mm. As
shown on the chart, the ball rolled about 2104 * 29/30 mm or about 2,034 mm (2.34 m), less than 7 ft,
in eight intervals (again, not necessarily seconds):

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The last column we added to show the multiples of the initial distance. The idea is to try to intuit a
pattern in the numbers, by dividing the initial distances by the first distance number (33) and seeing if
the other numbers are multiples of it. It is apparent that, after dividing each distance (which we will call
s) by 33, the last column increases approximately as the square of the time. Indeed it does not take a
great deal of rounding of this experimental data to make the relationship just that, as Galileo saw. The
exact relationship is confirmed by many repeated observations. It can be expressed by a simple
equation:

We have not explained what the k means in this equation. It is a “proportionality constant” whose value
determines the distance in the equation, in units of our choice. As we shall see, the constant is a
constant of acceleration, the gradual incremental addition to velocity in the presence of a force inducing
it.

The Meaning of Constant Acceleration

Uniformity of motion is defined by and conceived through equal times and equal spaces (thus we call a

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motion uniform when equal distances are traversed during equal time-intervals), so also we may, in a
similar manner, through equal time-intervals, conceive additions of speed as taking place without
complication; thus we may picture to our mind a motion as uniformly and continuously accelerated
when, during any equal intervals of time whatever, equal increments of speed are given to it. In other
words, in uniformly accelerated motion, the velocity will be proportional to time,

The proportionality constant to convert the proportion in to an equation must be the amount
by which increases in velocity occur steadily with time. This is the definition of constant acceleration. In
a freely falling object, acceleration in falling due to the Earth’s gravitational field is known from
experiment (and theory) to be 9.8 m/s per second. This means it gains 9.8 m/s in velocity each second of
its fall. Hence for such cases the equation may be written v = 9.8 t.

To make this clearer, suppose a rocket is boosting a probe into deep space at a constant acceleration of
10 m/s, every second. Constant acceleration means constant increase in velocity – in heaps of 10 m/s
velocity in every new second.

Every second begins with the velocity the object had at the end of the previous second. The incremental
addition to velocity in each second – the constant by which the time is multiplied – is 10, which is the
probe’s constant acceleration. Where acceleration (again symbolized by a) is constant, the equation for
velocity is, v = at.

The distance the spacecraft will go in a given time at this rate of velocity increase is also some function
of time. Let’s see what it is. If an object moves at constant velocity (zero acceleration), the distance it
travels is, s = v t

Where s is our symbol for distance. But the velocity in our case keeps increasing every second, at a
constant rate. For example, it goes 10 m/s in the first second and 20 m/s in the next second. So the

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overall velocity during these 2 s will not be 10 or 20 but the average of them, or 15 m/s. In 2 s, it will

actually traverse 30 m. Given an average velocity the distance equation become,

The distance the spacecraft travels will equal its average velocity times time. But is there a simpler way
of computing average velocity when we know acceleration? To compute the average of first two
velocities, as we did above, we mentally did this:

=( + )/2

To compute the average velocity over a span of time, we need to know how many seconds elapsed,

from the time the motion started, to the time it ended, .Since velocity will in each case be equal to
acceleration times time, the above equation becomes,

=( + )/2

Or, to simplify, assuming the start time is zero seconds, letting t just be elapsed time,

So in our example the average velocity in 5 s will be 25 m/s. How far will it go? To find out, substitute
the above equation for average velocity into the distance equation,

In 5s the spacecraft in our example with constant acceleration of 10 m/s, every second (expressed as 10

m/s^2) will therefore travel

This is the relationship between distance and uniformly accelerated motion which we saw was
discovered by Galileo from his experiments with rolling balls. The k in the relation s = kt^2 must
therefore equal half the acceleration: k = ½a, where the constant acceleration g (of 9.8 m/s^2) was

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furnished by the Earth’s gravity. Rewriting the equation specific to Earth’s gravitational acceleration we

have,

Notice that there is no horizontal component to this equation. The vertical distance is, again,
independent of any additional thrust, push, shove or shot in a direction perpendicular to line of descent.

If it takes 3 s for the rocks to reach the ground, the balls were dropped from about 44 m

The rolling ball experiment was Galileo’s attempt to find the proportional relationship between distance
traveled and time. This yielded the law that distance was proportional to time squared. Since he had
concluded that in uniformly accelerated motion an object’s velocity increased in a manner that was
proportional to time, he could intuit the correctness of the time-squared law for distance
mathematically. Here is an intuitive, non-geometrical shorthand version of his reasoning: The distance
covered by a non-accelerating object is proportional to velocity times time. But in a uniformly
accelerating body, that velocity is itself proportional to time. Hence the distance is proportional to times
squared. Expressed symbolically:

This result corresponds to the relation Galileo obtained in his rolling ball experiment. Hence he could
feel confidence in the truth of his theorem: “The spaces described by a body falling from rest with a
uniformly accelerated motion are to each other as the squares of the time-intervals employed in
traversing these distances.” Below is his line of argument and diagram proving the same problem we
worked through above.

Galileo Theorem I, Proposition I: “The time in which any space is traversed by a body starting from rest
and uniformly accelerated is equal to the time in which that same space would be traversed by the same

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body moving at a uniform speed whose value is the mean of the highest speed and the speed just
before acceleration began.”

A Summary of Galilean Equations