Temat 7: Free fall

Galileo was the first to state an important result about free fall: the motions in the horizontal and vertical directions are independent. He showed that the time it takes for a cannon ball that is shot exactly horizontally to fall is independent of the strength of the gunpowder, as shown in Figure 44.Many great thinkers did not agree with this statement even after his death: in 1658 the Academia del Cimento even organized an experiment to check this assertion, by comparing the flying cannon ball with one that simply fell vertically. Can you imagine how they checked the simultaneity?
Figure 44 also shows how you can check this at home. In this experiment, whatever the spring load of the cannon, the two bodies will always collide in mid-air (if the table is high enough), thus proving the assertion.

FIGURE 44 Two ways to test that the time of free fall does not depend on horizontal velocity.