Tuesday, March 04, 2003

On Question of Sport on BBC 1 last Friday, the panel had to work out which balls, shuttlecocks, darts etc were heaviest. In order to work this out, both sides dropped the objects to see which landed first. It's amazing that five centuries after Galileo, ordinary people are still Aristotelians at heart. I remember some footage at school of an astronaut on the moon dropping a feather and hammer and both landing at the same time (which happens as there is no air resistance on the moon). Perhaps that snippet of film needs a wider public.

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