I am most certainly not a science whiz but it’s so goddamn funny to see this whole comment section full of people just… explaning and correcting each other poorly with varying degrees of correctness. Just like 50 half-true and misremembered tidbits from everyone’s intro to high school physics class, blindly seeking targets in space. I promise you guys, there’s a very straight answer to this like two or three clicks away, written more clearly and succinctly than anyone here is managing to do.
yeah everything is probably made of like, idk, earth water, fire and air or something idrk
Submitted 5 weeks ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/b0b67885-8105-42c5-ab7f-f233b8a1d0d7.png
Comments
WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
fossilesque@mander.xyz 5 weeks ago
Don’t tell them that. You’re contaminating my petri dish.
SorryQuick@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Lemmy (or most social media) in a nutshell.
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I have noticed there is a bit of a more “anti intellectual” bent on Lemmy compared to Reddit. Like there is a lot of stupidity on reddit but usually someone comes in with actual knowledge. On Lemmy I just see people arguing in circles with each other with nobody ever actually looking anything up.
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 5 weeks ago
IMO, it’s okay to have casual conversations without being an expert or researching every post. Redditors’ habit of fact-checking everything is honestly tiring. Conversation has other purposes besides education. I think many people are looking more for human interaction than for correct facts.
kadup@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Like there is a lot of stupidity on reddit but usually someone comes in with actual knowledge
Be careful with that, actually. Reddit mastered repeating an explanation or analogy they read on another thread or saw on YouTube, but being quite eloquent at explaining it. Problem is, if they misunderstood it to begin with, they’ll just as confidently repeat a broken version.
I didn’t notice it at first… then I started seeing explanations for things on my field and cringed at how wrong they were, and then I started noticing the pattern and the very repeated analogies on other areas too.
it_depends_man@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The thing that always gets me about the renaissance is Galileo:
He did those experiments with things falling down? Measuring speed?
Yeah. Without a clock.
The theory for how to build those came later, based on what Galileo did.
MajorMajormajormajor@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Man, being a cop must have sucked before they invented time.
Officer: do you know how fast you were going?
Lord: No, do you?
Officers: grumbles you’re free to go.
Carriage pulls away
Officer ClocknTime: For now, for now.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Alright, I’m stealing this one for a Pathfinder session
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Clocks existed then though. The oldest clocktower in Europe that still exists was built over 100 years before Galileo was born, and time measurement existed longer than that. You can measure time fairly accurately with water clocks which had been known for thousands of years before Galileo. Not having “modern” pendulum clocks yet doesn’t mean that they didn’t have any way to measure time. Even without water clocks you can get decently reliable measurements of time with rhythmic chants (think how today we might say "one Mississippi, two Mississippi, etc.). Early alchemical recipes often include time measurements in chanting a specific prayer or passage a certain number of times during a specific step. Sure you’re not going to get milisecond level accuracy this way but you don’t really need that for a lot of things. Hero of Alexandria built mechanical automata 1500 years before Galileo using pulleys and weights as timers. Time measurement not only existed before pendulum clocks, it was pretty decent.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 5 weeks ago
Couldn’t even measure it in Mississippis because they hadn’t discovered it yet.
olafurp@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
www.usgs.gov/…/how-much-does-a-cloud-weigh
Doing the math: 1,000,000,000 x 0.5 = 500,000,000 grams of water droplets in our cloud. That is about 500,000 kilograms or 1.1 million pounds (about 551 tons). But, that “heavy” cloud is floating over your head because the air below it is even heavier— the lesser density of the cloud allows it to float on the dryer and more-dense air.
olafurp@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Depends on whether or not you count in air resistance. I was just making a shitpost
Ephera@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
You can find exceptions, but on average, heavier objects will fall very slightly faster than light ones, because they excert their own gravity field onto Earth and pull therefore it towards themselves.
This requires a somewhat unintuitive definition of “falling”, in that both the object and Earth itself moves, but given that any object with mass excerts a gravitational field, there is not actually any other definition.
dudinax@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
Try dropping your phone from a hot air balloon and see which one hits the ground first.
MummysLittleBloodSlut@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
A hot air balloon masses a lot but weighs nothing
olafurp@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Let’s argue “what in heavy” before we go there
DreadPirateShawn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Rosencrantz: [holds up a feather and a wooden ball] Look at this. You would think this would fall faster than this.
[drops them. ball hits the ground first]
…and you would be absolutely right.~ Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
davidagain@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Brilliant, brilliant film.
davidagain@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
To be fair to Archimedes, heavy objects do usually fall faster than light ones*, and to be fair to Newton, stuff coming towards you usually has a higher relative velocity than things going away from you.+
*You need your objects to be weigh a lot relative to their air resistance to notice otherwise.
+You need some pretty ambitious equipment to detect that electromagnetic radiation such as light does not follow this pattern.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
If you like novels I highly recommend Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson. It has a moment where Galileo realizes you could “weigh” time, in his experiments with objects rolling down an inclined plane.
Carl@hexbear.net 5 weeks ago
They did figure out the earth was round and measure its size with sticks and shadows though, so that’s pretty cool.
fullsquare@awful.systems 5 weeks ago
Aristotle said so much dumb shit, like he said that womrn have less teeth and never bothered to check
Zerush@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
With same gravity constance everything fall down at the same speed, but only in a vacuum. In an atmosphere there count the air resistance of an object, even if they are made of the same material and weight, an iron sphere of 1 kg fall faster than a iron sheet of 1 kg.
multifariace@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
That’s why Gallileo’s balls were so special.
KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz 5 weeks ago
With two metal balls, one solid and one hollow, you could rule out the role of resistance?
falcunculus@jlai.lu 5 weeks ago
That’s clever, it would eliminate aerodynamism as a factor.
However results would still vary, because hollowing out the metal ball increases its buoyancy (see Archimedes’ principle).
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I mean, yes and no.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity#Physics
Heavier objects have a higher “max speed” that they can fall at, compared to lighter objects. The acceleration to that relative speed is constant though. More or less.IE : While a bowling ball and a ping pong ball might start falling at the same initial rate, eventually the bowling ball will fall faster.
rockerface@lemmy.cafe 5 weeks ago
In a medium, which is an important distinction
bizarroland@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Yeah, it’s not like they just blindly accepted what he said. They held up a feather or a leaf or a sheet of paper and a lead weight and dropped them both at the same time and the lead weight hit the ground while the leaf was still fluttering in the wind.
Empricorn@feddit.nl 5 weeks ago
That’s not because of weight though. That’s just one thing being affected more by air resistance. In a vacuum, there would be no difference. In fact, they did just that during the Apollo 15 mission on the moon using a feather and a hammer:
shalafi@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Hey buddy! I came to post that video!
I know what is happening. I know why it is happening. My brain is still screaming at the feather to slow down.
oftheair@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
…wikimedia.org/…/File:Apollo_15_feather_and_hamme…
Without the m as the browser will decide for itself if it needs the mobile version.
NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 5 weeks ago
The acceleration to that relative speed is constant though. More or less.
It's not. Air resistance will affect lighter objects more due to Newton's second law and the square-cube law, resulting in heavier objects accelerating faster than light ones. Only at the initial instant, where there is no air resistance due to the speed being 0, will two objects of different weight be subject to the same downward acceleration.
LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
oftheair@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Without the m as the browser will decide for itself it if needs the mobile version.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I can’t tell if this is you chastising me or giving me a shovel to help me dig.
Dasus@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Iheartcheese@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
It’s how Arthur fell faster then Fenchurch. He was heavier.
thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe 5 weeks ago
The trick was to throw yourself at the ground and miss
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Did you know that two identical triangles are identical to each other
Hupf@feddit.org 5 weeks ago
But what about three identical digons?
Matriks404@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
What if a ball with a mass of Earth falls down on Earth from let’s say 5-10 meters though?
hansolo@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
Straight to jail.
GandalftheBlack@feddit.org 5 weeks ago
Do not pass go. Do not collect
M200
mEEGal@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
A thing that size would have initial velocity to begin with,
But acceleration does not depend on mass, (which is kinda weird from an earthling’s perspective), which Einstein formalized in an amazingly powerful theory called General Relativity
glorkon@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
It would fall at 2g, because two Earth-sized masses attract each other in that case. With smaller objects it’s just 1g, because the mass of, let’s say, a nice cup of tea is negligible compared to the mass of Earth.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
TBF it took awhile to work out vacuum chamber technology, and some people did throw some spherical stuff off the tower of pisa at one point.
plinky@hexbear.net 5 weeks ago
make a vacuum without bamboo, and with medieval tech 😤
LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins@hexbear.net 5 weeks ago
What about bamboo
Ceruleum@lemmy.wtf 5 weeks ago
These days, everything seems to be made out shit & piss.
i_love_FFT@jlai.lu 5 weeks ago
The four phases of matter! Solid liquid gas and plasma!
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Wait… What about the other 16 phases?!
i_love_FFT@jlai.lu 5 weeks ago
Ice I, ice II, … all the way to Ice XVI!
Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 5 weeks ago
Due to air resistance, heavy objects do tend to fall slightly faster in atmosphere.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Take a balloon, fill it with air and drop it from a plane next to say a brick. The balloon may not hit the ground for awhile, especially if it gets caught on some air streams
XiaCobolt@hexbear.net 5 weeks ago
People have mentioned air resistance but the four elements also works as a model of the states of matter.
robot_dog_with_gun@hexbear.net 5 weeks ago
there are more states
XiaCobolt@hexbear.net 5 weeks ago
Yeah but as an ancient dude you can observe like 4 easily.
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Something something friction
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Everything is made all of those in combinations and varied quantities at the molecular level
luckyeddy@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
missingno@fedia.io 5 weeks ago
When accounting for air resistance, heavy objects do fall faster than light ones. They couldn't test in a vacuum back then, they only knew how things work here in Earth's atmosphere.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
A similar size chunk of iron and coal would have done the experiment just fine. Any two objects of the same shape and size but significantly different densities.
missingno@fedia.io 5 weeks ago
If two objects have the same size and shape, the force applied by air resistance will be the same. However, if two objects have different mass, that same force will result in different acceleration.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 5 weeks ago
And the iron would hit the ground much faster because it pushes air molecules out of the way quicker.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
They could just drop an empty bs filled wine bottle.
Maybe fill it with mercury (but don’t drink it)
waigl@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Nope, denser objects fall faster than less dense ones (through the air). Remember: A kilogram of feathers is just as heavy as a kilogram of lead.
BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
I’ll still choose to be hit by the feathers.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Technically it’s objects with a higher mass-to-drag ratio, but most of the time it’s close enough
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Not really true, it’s definitely possible for a less dense object to fall faster than a denser one. A drop of water will fall faster than a parachute made of aluminum.