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.

Planes, helicopters- lots heavy stuff not falling faster than lighter ones

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Depends on whether or not you count in air resistance. I was just making a shitpost

[–] LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Interesting way to admit you were wrong

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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 therefore pull 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.

[–] LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wut? This does not turn off gravitational pull for objects other than Earth.

Or I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say, but yeah, no clue.

[–] LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You didn't read it, it is literally telling you you are wrong.

By experimenting with the acceleration of different materials, Galileo Galilei determined that gravitation is independent of the amount of mass being accelerated

"... in a uniform gravitational field all objects, regardless of their composition, fall with precisely the same acceleration."

What is now called the "Einstein equivalence principle" states that the weak equivalence principle [above] holds

Tests of the weak equivalence principle are those that verify the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass. An obvious test is dropping different objects and verifying that they land at the same time. Historically this was the first approach – though probably not by Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment[19]: 19–21 but instead earlier by Simon Stevin,[20] who dropped lead balls of different masses off the Delft churchtower and listened for the sound of them hitting a wooden plank.

Between 1589 and 1592,[1] the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (then professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa) is said to have dropped "unequal weights of the same material" from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass

Newton measured the period of pendulums made with different materials as an alternative test giving the first precision measurements.[3] Loránd Eötvös's approach in 1908 used a very sensitive torsion balance to give precision approaching 1 in a billion. Modern experiments have improved this by another factor of a million.

Experiments are still being performed at the University of Washington which have placed limits on the differential acceleration of objects towards the Earth, the Sun and towards dark matter in the Galactic Center.[45] Future satellite experiments[46] – Satellite Test of the Equivalence Principle[47] and Galileo Galilei – will test the weak equivalence principle in space, to much higher accuracy.[48]

With the first successful production of antimatter, in particular anti-hydrogen, a new approach to test the weak equivalence principle has been proposed. Experiments to compare the gravitational behavior of matter and antimatter are currently being developed.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah, I'm not saying there's a different force being applied to feather vs. hammer. The meme above doesn't mean that they "fall faster" in the sense that the hammer falls at a higher velocity. It's rather colloquial usage of "faster" to mean "finishes sooner". Because what does happen, is that the hammer collides sooner with Earth, since the hammer pulls the Earth towards itself ever-so-slightly stronger than the feather does.

I guess, for this to work, you cannot drop hammer and feather at the same time in the same place, since they would both pull Earth towards themselves with a combined force. You need to drop them one after another for the stronger pull of the hammer to have an effect.

So, this is also going off of this formula:

F = G * mass_1 * mass_2 / distance²

But setting mass_1 as Earth's mass and mass_2 as either the feather's or hammer's mass. A higher mass_2 ultimately leads to a higher force of attraction F.

[–] LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

So in that equation, let's say mass 1 is earth. G and distance will be equal in both instances of dropping.

Rewrite equation:

Distance^2/ G*mass 1 = mass 2 /force

And

Distance^2/ G*mass 1 = mass 3 /force

Therefore,

Mass 2 /force = mass 3 /force

F = m*a

Mass 2 / mass 2*a = mass 3 / mass 3 * a

This cancels out to show that a = a, their acceleration is the same.