Enlarge / There’s a protracted custom of experimentally testing the weak equivalence precept—the premise of Albert Einstein’s normal idea of relativity. (credit score: ONERA)
Some of the counter-intuitive notions in physics is that each one objects fall on the identical fee, no matter mass, aka the equivalence precept. This was memorably illustrated in 1971 by NASA Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott throughout a moonwalk. He dropped a falcon feather and a hammer on the identical time by way of a reside tv feed, and the 2 objects hit the dust concurrently.
There is a lengthy custom of experimentally testing the weak equivalence precept, which kinds the premise of Albert Einstein’s normal idea of relativity. In check after check over many centuries, the equivalence precept has held robust. And now the MICROSCOPE (MICROSatellite pour l’Statement de Principe d’Equivalence) mission has achieved probably the most exact check of the equal precept so far, confirming Einstein but once more, per a current paper revealed within the journal Bodily Evaluation Letters. (Extra associated papers appeared in a particular challenge of Classical and Quantum Gravity.)
Testing, 1,2,3
John Philoponus, the Sixth-century thinker, was the primary to contend that the rate at which an object will fall has nothing to do with its weight (mass) and later grew to become a significant affect on Galileo Galilei some 900 years later. Galileo supposedly dropped cannonballs of various plenty off Italy’s famed Leaning Tower of Pisa, however the story might be apocryphal.
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