Light as a Feather = Heavy as a Bowling Ball

Most of you know that any two objects dropped in a vacuum will fall at the same rate. Some of you have probably even seen it demonstrated in person. Even so this video is pretty amazing!

Physicist Brian Cox visited NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio to check out the Agency's Space Simulation Chamber. At 30.5 meters across and 37.2 meters tall, the colossal aluminum construction has a volume of 22,653 cubic meters (or about ~800,000 cubic feet), making it the biggest vacuum chamber in the world.

Corina Marinescu posted the foregoing in the Physics community on Google+, and I commented thus:

The endurance of Newtonian physics is that there is still quite a bit of wonder in it: That something literally as light as a feather and something as heavy as a bowling ball do fall at the same rate. It is also amazing that Sir Isaac surmised this in the absence of modern day instrumentation.

Enter, Einstein: I'm super-intrigued by his notions of gravity (i.e. as curved spacetime à la Theories of Relativity). To consider, for example, that neither feather nor ball is actually falling is quite a heady thing indeed!

It is interesting to note that Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize was not for general or special relativity (even though it came at the heels of a breathtaking proof of his Theory of General Relativity). A hundred years since, physicists and laypeople alike are still trying to get their heads around around Herr Professor's head!

I did say it was a heady thing, didn't I.