It's only gravitation...

Wee floaty feathers like this always remind me of my high school physics teacher Miss Baillie.

She wasn't as delicate as a feather in any way but she did have a glass vacuum tube about a metre long containing a nail and a floaty feather. It kind of resembled a clear fluro strip light but it's purpose was to illustrate how gravity works without the influence of air resistance. When you drop a nail and feather together in normal earth grounded circumstances the nail should hit the ground first with the feather floating much slower down to rest. In Miss Baillie's vacuum tube however, because there is no air resistance, you turn it over and both nail and feather fall at the same rate.

On a similar note, did you know that, if you drop a bullet at exactly the same time as firing a bullet horizontally from a gun at the same height then as long as nothing impedes the fired bullet's path, they will both hit the ground at exactly the same time?

Apparently not a lot of people realize that and most suprisingly, Stephen Fry found it suprising which I found rather suprising as he seems to know an awful lot about an awful lot of things.

Notes on gravitational news snippets...
If you've still not given up on my mind wander for today and still reading, I thought it probably relevant to pass on a related news item I read yesterday. Apparently there the Royal Society owns a piece of wood from the apple tree that inspired Isaac Newton to devise his theory on gravitational effect and they have given it along with a picture of the man himself to an astronaut who is due to take them on one of the last space shuttle flights. They do however want it back, it's not getting Rodenberry'd out into outer space. It would seen the chaps and chapesses at the Royal Society are not without a sense of emotional nostalgia.

Watch this space for the mind wander about the bullet the flew so fast it orbited the earth.