Legend has it that Galileo Galilei He took two spheres of different sizes, dropping them from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. His intention was to break with Aristotle’s theory of gravity, which said that objects fall at a speed proportional to their masses.
The astronomer, engineer, mathematician and physicist born in Pisa in 1564 and died in Arcetri in 1642, would have demonstrated Aristotle’s error.
The truth is that it is not known if Galileo Galilei’s experiment was real or just mental, but in 1971, NASA astronaut David Scott confirmed the Italian’s theory from the Moon!
For this he used a hammer and a pen. That’s how it all happened.
David Scott, during the Apollo 15 lunar mission, He showed that heavy and lighter objects fall at the same rate.
Taken to the extreme, He took a geological hammer and a pen. The hammer weighed 1.32 kilograms, while the feather was 0.03 kilograms according to the report (although NASA corrects it, pointing out that it should be 0.0003 or 0.003 kilograms).
On Earth it would have been difficult to achieve it, since the feather floats slowly due to air resistance. But there is no air on the Moon.
So, he took both elements and he released them, both falling at the same speed. It worked.
“Within the precision of the simultaneous release,” indicates NASA, “it was observed that The objects experienced the same acceleration and hit the lunar surface simultaneously, which was a result predicted by a well-established theory.”
The aerospace agency called David Scott’s experiment “reassuring, considering both the number of spectators who witnessed it and the fact that the trip home was critically based on the validity of the particular theory being tested.”
Thus, 382 years after Galileo Galilei experimented, really or mentally, with the two objects of different masses falling at the same speed, David Scott verified the truth of his theory from the Moon itself.