Don't tell them that. You're contaminating my petri dish. ;)

Lemmy (or most social media) in a nutshell.

I have noticed there is a bit of a more "anti intellectual" bent on Lemmy compared to Reddit. Like there is a lot of stupidity on reddit but usually someone comes in with actual knowledge. On Lemmy I just see people arguing in circles with each other with nobody ever actually looking anything up.

A similar size chunk of iron and coal would have done the experiment just fine. Any two objects of the same shape and size but significantly different densities.

If you like novels I highly recommend Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson. It has a moment where Galileo realizes you could "weigh" time, in his experiments with objects rolling down an inclined plane.

https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/how-much-does-a-cloud-weigh

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

Man, being a cop must have sucked before they invented time.

Officer: do you know how fast you were going?

Lord: No, do you?

Officer grumbles: you're free to go.

Carriage pulls away

Officer ClocknTime: For now, for now.

Clocks existed then though. The oldest clocktower in Europe that still exists was built over 100 years before Galileo was born, and time measurement existed longer than that. You can measure time fairly accurately with water clocks which had been known for thousands of years before Galileo. Not having "modern" pendulum clocks yet doesn't mean that they didn't have any way to measure time. Even without water clocks you can get decently reliable measurements of time with rhythmic chants (think how today we might say "one Mississippi, two Mississippi, etc.). Early alchemical recipes often include time measurements in chanting a specific prayer or passage a certain number of times during a specific step. Sure you're not going to get milisecond level accuracy this way but you don't really need that for a lot of things. Hero of Alexandria built mechanical automata 1500 years before Galileo using pulleys and weights as timers. Time measurement not only existed before pendulum clocks, it was pretty decent.

That's why Gallileo's balls were so special.

Straight to jail.

A thing that size would have initial velocity to begin with,

But acceleration does not depend on mass, (which is kinda weird from an earthling's perspective), which Einstein formalized in an amazingly powerful theory called General Relativity

It would fall at 2g, because two Earth-sized masses attract each other in that case. With smaller objects it's just 1g, because the mass of, let's say, a nice cup of tea is negligible compared to the mass of Earth.