Do Heavy Objects Actually Fall Faster Than Light Objects? DEBUNKED

Actually, if you can measure it arcuately enough, the bowling ball will always hit the ground first because it is less affected by atmospheric drag (compared to the force exerted on it by gravity) no matter what height you drop the balls from. The difference will be miniscule from a height of a few meters though.

Thanks, Stu & the rest of the Debunked team! I love seeing new content from you. This is a good one, too.

When analyzing the forces on a moving ball, if we assume both balls are at the same speed, we can see that for a light ball, the air resistance is large relative to its gravitational force, while for a heavy ball the drag is small compared to the gravitational force. Because of this, drag has a much larger effect on a lighter object, and a heavier object will always accelerate faster and reach higher speeds than a light ball when falling through a fluid.

TL:DR Q: "Does gravity exist" A: "Yes."

hey I must say it is a pleasure to stumble on a channel that goes in details about questions that are commonly brushed away with a simple but inexact "well known" answer, I am a mechanical engineer and I'm more and more concerned about the false assomptions that are becoming common in the field so thank you for your great work in explaining these phenomenas !!

Thought before the video: It depends on the hight you drop it from. There are to major forces that work here. One is the gravitation and the other is the air resistance. The gravitational force is constant and dependend of the weight of the droped object. The other gets greater the faster the object falls. At the start both balls accelerate with normal falling acceleration of ~9.81 meter/second². The faster the balls falls the greater is the influence of air resistance and the acceleration slows down. The heavier ball will allways be faster if droped in the atmosphere but the difference gets unrecognisable at low hights.

If you slow it down you can see the bowling ball start slightly above the basketball and the bowling ball hits the ground slightly before the basketball. And this is before terminal velocity takes affect.

Its great to see you implementing real life clips into this video, hopefully we get to see some more irl footage in future videos :)

I enjoyed this, thanks. Since you already included a brief shot of skydivers, you could also have mentioned that an object that can change the amount of surface area it presents to the air resisting it can influence its freefall velocity. This is exactly what skydivers do in order to catch up to those who have exited the plane before them, and also (more subtly) to stay "on level" with the people they are jumping with.

What objects do you have close to hand to test this out right now?

Important calculation is whether the ball will hit the ground before Empire State building security can catch you.

This is THE explanation of non lab fall physics I needed for at least 10ys, concise, easy to understand, well animated, with some IRL footage ontop - thank you. well, need is an overstatement, and the reason for it is banal, but still, things that knaw at you in the back of your mind after an argument in reallife and/or online. One of these was about a story where a character could change their weight and through that, among other use cases, fall faster, and a lot(!) of people came along with lab-condition rules to claim its lack of realism, totally ignoring air resistance, terminal velocity etc (not that I could explain that well enough, but the argument always was 'that's negligable' .... now I will lead them here :D )

1:30 heavier ball DID hit the ground first even despite being released a bit higher.

Great video. This channel is so underrated.

One other way to think about it is that the speed of the ball is impacted by two forces - 1) The downward force of gravity 2) The upward (backward) force required to push the air out of the way. These forces cause an acceleration by Newton's Law rewritten as a=F/M. Since the force due to gravity is Fg-Mg them the acceleration caused by gravity is the same for all objects a=Fg/M=Mg/M=g. This is not true for the acceleration caused by the air. That force is not affected by the mass of an object but only its speed and air resistance so since a=F/M, if you increase the mass of the object then the acceleration will decrease and since that acceleration is upward (backward) the object will fall faster. The velocity when this value is the same as the acceleration due to (g) is the terminal velocity since at that point the two accelerations cancel each other out and the object will stop accelerating (its velocity will stop changing).

In the first situation,(empire state building hight fall, in regular atmosphere) the bowling ball will hit ground first - It's high enough that atmospheric drag would come into play, and I daresay that the basket ball would reach terminal velocity. However, in a vacuum they'll hit the floor at the same time.

Which do you think will hit the ground first?

Going back to the penny drop... What if the balls were the size of the penny (albeit spherical)? The mass is greatly reduced and therefore the air resistance. With that in mind, I would like to think the terminal velocity would be achieved much faster for even the heaviest.

At first I was like meh I know this subject quite well. Then I was like ok that’s something new. Great video.

Best explanation I’ve seen the the topic. Well done