Science Memes

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262

ur dada so buff he falls significantly faster than g (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The bowling ball isn’t falling to the earth faster. The higher perceived acceleration is due to the earth falling toward the bowling ball.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Physics books always say to assume the objects are points in doing calculations. Does the fact that the ball is thicker then the feather make a difference?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Possibly?

A bowling ball is more dense than a feather (I assume) and that's probably going to matter more than just the size. Things get messy when you start considering the actual mass distributions, and honestly the easiest way to do any calculations like that is to just break each object up into tiny point like masses that are all rigidly connected, and then calculate all the forces between all of those points on a computer.

I full expect it just won't matter as much as the difference in masses.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

For the bowling ball, Newton’s shell theorem applies, right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Yeah it would fair point, I'll be honest I haven't touched Newtonian gravity in a long time now so I'd forgotten that was a thing. You'd still need to do a finite element calculation for the feather though.

There's a similar phenomenon in general relativity, but it doesn't apply when you've got multiple sources because it's non-linear.

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