Physics: Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment

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Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment By: Galileo Galilei (1589) Between 1589 and 1592, 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, according to a biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani, composed in 1654 and published in 1717.

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Source: Wikipedia

Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment (1589) Performed by: Galileo Galilei Between 1589 and 1592, 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, according to a biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani, composed in 1654 and published in 1717.

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What makes Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment sig nificant? This experiment is remembered because it gave scientists a way to directly test a theory about nature rather than just theorizing about it. The result either confirmed or challenged what physicists believed at the time.

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Source: Wikipedia

About Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment Between 1589 and 1592, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (then professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa) is said to have dropped "unequal weights of th e same material" from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass, according to a biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani, composed in 1654 and published in 1717. The basic premise had already been demonstrated by Italian experimenters a few decades earlier. According to the story, Galileo discovered through this experiment that the objects fell with the same acceleration, proving his prediction true, while at the same time disproving Aristotle's theory of gravity (which states that objects fall at speed proportional to their mass). Though Viviani wrote that Galileo conducted "repeated experiments made from the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the presence of other professors and all the students," most historians consider it to have been a thought experiment rather than a physical test.