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u/BLYNDLUCK 20h ago
Not showing regular speed it videos is a real crime.
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u/sachsrandy 19h ago
Exactly. Wtf were they thinking. "You know what people wanna see... A bowling ball falling at normal speed but slowed down. People have never seen that before".
They spent probably thousands of dollars to show us what slow motion looks like.
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u/jollycreation 18h ago
I can’t describe how disappointed I am that full speed wasn’t shown. I’ve tried to imagine it in my mind since grade school.
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u/islaisla 18h ago
About 9.8mph if I remember rightly? I don't want to look it up as I feel like I'll learn better if someone corrected me. It's gravitational pull at it's max?
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u/Shudnawz 17h ago
9,8 m/s2, which is the gravitational acceleration of an object near the Earths surface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gravity
It's lower the further away from Earth you go, but (theoretically) never zero. In a completely empty universe, with the Earth at one end, and you at the other, after some unimaginably long period of time, you'd still come together.
But you are correct that the gravitational pull at the surface is the maximum for a given sphere; if you decend below the surface, all the matter above you will also pull on you, in effect negating some of the gravitational pull the rest of the Earth would have.
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u/islaisla 17h ago
That's lovely stuff! Thank you for reminding me it's m/s2 !!! Feels so much better now that I see it that way :-)
I didn't know it was never zero!!!! That just seems impossible knowing how big space is ...! :-)
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u/HeavisideGOAT 12h ago
The force of gravity is not, in fact, strongest at the surface: it depends on the radial distribution of mass. For earth, gravity increases before it decreases.
Furthermore, as you descend below the surface, the matter above you will pull away from the center, but you have gotten closer to the bulk of the mass. The net effect is that you can neglect all of the mass of the sphere that is at a lesser depth below the surface.
E.g., if you have drilled 1000m into the earth, the effect of all the matter above that depth cancels and can be ignored. This is assuming spherical symmetry of density and that the earth is a perfect sphere.
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u/sachsrandy 19h ago
You know what I've seen 100 times before feathers falling slowly.... You know what I haven't seen feathers falling fast because of no wind... Shiw the goddamn thing in real time. f***
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u/reaven3958 18h ago
Here you go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GloPoezzVAg (end of the video ~0:19, it's quite fast)
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u/sachsrandy 17h ago
You know what would make it better. A giant vacuum structure. Like 50 feet. And remove the air from there. Then show that in regular speed. (I watch t His original source. And it's not there either. Turns out the director, producer and editors' of that program were all equally idiots)
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u/ProgySuperNova 19h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg
But what's heavier? A kilogram of steel or a kilogram of feathers?
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u/Varendolia 19h ago
I was going to say something like they could have done this inside a vertical tube and it would've been easier and less expensive.
But after watching it, there's something special about seeing something that you would never see naturally in earth. It's not even the fact that they fall at the same time but the way in which a bunch of feathers fall just straight down, no deviation, no rotation, that was weird to me even if I knew it would happen.
Given the emotion of the people who did the experiment, I guess it was the same for them too.
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u/SelfSufficientHub 20h ago
Love this so much. The pure joy and excitement of watching really smart physicists ,who know what is going to happen because they can prove it hypothetically with a pen and some paper, seeing it happen in real life is palpable.
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u/Morgankgb 20h ago
This is one of my favorite experiments
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u/BluetheNerd 19h ago
Every time I see this I'm blown away by the sheer scale they're able to build a vacuum chamber at.
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u/cloudsareedible 19h ago
back when i was studying physics in highschool, i had a very hard time understanding the basics of the basics... i really hated it because of it... this video was one of many that my private teacher had shown me... at the time, it helped me alot see physics straight up... it may he funny, but it took me alot of time to realize that physics is all around us...
this video was one of many that made me go from gating physics to loving it
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u/Least_Particular3086 3h ago
and what physics did you discover here? What conclusions did you draw? And on what laws, formulas can these conclusions be based? The video is actually misleading and is only suitable for schoolchildren.
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u/cloudsareedible 2h ago
freefall, i remember it being the first subject i was thought in kinematics... for the life of me i couldnt understand it
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u/Infinite-Alps2081 19h ago
who never dreamt of being the man in the control room pushing the MEGA SPEED TRIGGER button? 1:43
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u/SeniorSesameRocker 17h ago
"All lies, they've switched the ball to something made with feather-like material and dipped the feathers in a heavy liquid to make it heavier."
Something I would've said if I didn't trust Physics. 
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u/lordmike72 17h ago
Frustrating to not show at real speed. We know what shit looks like falling in slow motion.
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u/Haunting-Sky-975 18h ago
It’s the same studio Armstrong did this experiment in but with a hammer and a space costume, you can tell from the lighting.
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u/quilldefender 18h ago
Does terminal velocity effect this at all?
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u/Express_Cellist5138 17h ago
Terminal velocity occurs when drag equals the force of gravity. Without drag there is no such thing as terminal velocity as in a perfect vacuum you would just keep accelerating.
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u/madsci 17h ago
I've flown high-altitude balloons up to about 110,000' and things get crazy up there. Parachutes don't work like you'd expect. Things move fast. My typical payload is a foam cooler about a 10" on a side and weighing 2-3 pounds and even with the parachute it has an initial terminal velocity of around 500 MPH. It can be very challenging to not get your parachute and everything tangled up during that first part of the fall.
This is the best shot I ever got of the burst, for a TV show. You can't see the dummy's parachute but you can see the shreds of latex balloon blast downward about 30 feet and wrap around the dummy. That material is about the thickness of a latex glove, maybe less. You wouldn't think it could move that fast. And we couldn't have asked for better results - the shreds wrapped around the dummy and gave it much more of a sense of speed than it would have had otherwise.
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u/Anon_be_thy_name 18h ago
I've seen this on gifs that end too soon enough times that I thought I was going to get hoodwinked again.
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u/SandeeBelarus 17h ago
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in Your life.
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u/DiodeMcRoy 11h ago
Or you'll end up hating what you originally loved doing and was passionate about. Now it's just your job, and if if there's a day you don't want to hear about it, well it's your job so you still have to do it. But maybe it's better than doing a job you weren't interested in from the start? I'm Not having definitive answer about that.
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u/madsci 17h ago
I saw a video like this on Facebook yesterday and the flat earthers all dogpiled on it - probably because it featured someone in a pressure suit - and then couldn't actually express what they thought was fake. They've just got a knee jerk response that anything demonstrating counterintuitive physics must be fake.
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u/corejuice 17h ago
What's that chamber normally used for? Testing space ships?
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u/haplud0l 9h ago
Yes, it’s part of NASA’s Glen Research Center in Ohio. From wiki, “ It was originally commissioned for nuclear-electric power studies under vacuum conditions, but was later decommissioned. It was subsequently recommissioned for use in testing spacecraft propulsion systems. Recent uses include testing the airbag landing systems for the Mars Pathfinder and the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, under simulated Mars atmospheric conditions.”
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u/SpinCharm 15h ago
I love that the feathers don’t rotate at all. I had expected a tiny deflection from a few remaining molecules but nope.
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u/Cheshire-Cad 13h ago
"Okay, the chamber's at minimum possible PSI. Do you wanna start the test?"
"Yeah. But first, we need some footage of y'all spouting random numbers, acronyms, and radio jargon as dramatically as possible. You gotta act like this highschool physics demonstration is the greatest leap for mankind since the moon landing. We're gonna need the most grandiose launch-countdown you can muster. Are you able to cry with joy on command?"
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u/SatoruMikami7 11h ago
What happens if you blast a hole through that chamber while it’s vacuum sealed?
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u/Taptrick 11h ago
Give us the full speed what a joke. The most impressive thing here is to see a feather literally falling like a bowling ball.
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u/Koltaia30 7h ago
At first bowling ball fast and feather slow. You remove air then both is slow. What the hell 😳?
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u/ZealousidealBread948 6h ago
The box should have sand inside, it is less harmful and more rewarding to see
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u/Pluviophilism 5h ago
*builds a 50 foot vacuum enclosure to test this*
And now what we've all come to see.
Something no one here has ever seen before.....
A feather falling in slow motion.
Wow look how slowly that feather falls. That was so cool. I'm so glad I got to see a feather falling slowly twice in one video. Wow.
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u/YOYOWORKOUT 5h ago
I find this amazing, so upvote...
However :
- what is the cost of this ?
- how much energy did it require ?
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u/Fit-Let8175 18h ago
MUCH better spending multi millions of dollars to basically recreate, but to a grander scale, the same experiment done in high-school for FAR less money.
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u/madsci 17h ago
They didn't build this vacuum chamber for the sake of dropping feathers.
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u/Fit-Let8175 17h ago
I kind of figured that. Any idea as to why they built this? The vacuum chambers I've seen are so much smaller. Wondering why they thought they needed one so large.
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u/fieldmarshalscrub 17h ago
Simple answer; spacecraft are big. This is at NASA and is used to test space capsules among many other things.
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20h ago
[deleted]
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u/SelfSufficientHub 20h ago
Only the bottoms of the feathers which started below the bottom of the ball because they are longer from top to bottom
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u/HimothyOnlyfant 19h ago
wow you’re right i guess we need to rethink our understanding of gravity. crazy no one noticed this until you did. how could newton and galileo be so stupid?
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