What did Galileo argue about falling objects?

Answer 1

It was thought at the time that heavier ojects fall faster.

Galileo performed following thought experiment:

what would happen if you tied two bricks with a piece of a string and throw them from a top of the tower. At some point of the fall, the string is being cut.

If it was true that heavier objects fall faster, the rate of falling of two bricks tied together would be higher than two separate bricks.

That's however untrue.

Answer 2

He argued that all objects, no matter the mass, falls at the same rate(approx 9.8 ms^-2), considering air resistance is negligible. Take the classic feather and ball example, if you drop the 2 on Earth, the ball will fall faster because compared to the feather, it has a less surface area. If you repeat this process on the moon, they will fall at the same time, because there is no air resistance up there.

Answer 3

He said they all fall at the same rate. This was a huge change from established theory at the time, which said heavier things fall faster than lighter things.

Galileo reasoned that this was silly ... what if I take a 10 pound steel ball and a 20 pound steel ball and drop them? Ptolemy says the 20 pound ball falls twice as fast. Galileo said, okay, fine, now let's suppose I tie them together with a string. The twenty pound ball falls twice as fast until it pulls the string tight. Now what? Does the ten pound ball slow the twenty pound ball down, or does the 20 pound ball speed the ten pound ball up? Do they fall together at an average speed, as if they were 15 pound balls? Do they fall together as if they were a 30 pound ball? And how does the ball know what it's tied to so it knows how to fall?

So he decided to do some actual experiments, and discovered that, once you get out of the range of very light stuff (feathers, small pieces of cloth), it pretty much doesn't matter how much something weighs; a 10 pound ball and a 20 pound ball fall at almost exactly the same speed. He also correctly reasoned that it was air resistance that makes the light stuff fall so slowly, and proved it putting a feather and a coin in a tube and sucking the air out of it, after which they fell at the same speed too.

Answer 4

Galileo's formulation of inertia, the law of falling bodies, and parabolic trajectories marked the change in the study of motion.

Answer 5

that two objects of about the same shape and size, but of different weights, will drop at the same speed.

Answer 6

He threw a small stone from the tower of Pisa, Italy.

Answer 7

He dropped things from towers in Italy.

Answer 8

He dropped things off the towers of Italy.