Free Fall: Free Fall

Introduction to Free Fall

A free falling object is an object that is falling under the sole influence of gravity. Any object that is being acted upon only by the force of gravity is said to be in a state of free fall. There are two important motion characteristics that are true of free-falling objects:

Free-falling objects do not encounter air resistance.
All free-falling objects (on Earth) accelerate downwards at a rate of 9.8 m/s/s (often approximated as 10 m/s/s for back-of-the-envelope calculations)

Because free-falling objects are accelerating downwards at a rate of 9.8 m/s/s, a ticker tape trace or dot diagram of its motion would depict an acceleration. The dot diagram at the right depicts the acceleration of a free-falling object. The position of the object at regular time intervals - say, every 0.1 second - is shown. The fact that the distance that the object travels every interval of time is increasing is a sure sign that the ball is speeding up as it falls downward. If an object travels downward and speeds up, then its acceleration is downward.

(source: http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/1dkin/u1l5a.cfm)

(source: http://waiferx.blogspot.com/2011/07/presentation-projectile-motion.html)

The motion of falling objects

a / Galileo dropped a cannonball and a musketball simultaneously from a tower, and observed that they hit the ground at nearly the same time. This contradicted Aristotle's long-accepted idea that heavier objects fell faster.

c / The v-t graph of a falling object is a line.

d / Galileo's experiments show that all falling objects have the same motion if air resistance is negligible.

e / 1. Aristotle said that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. 2. If two rocks are tied together, that makes an extra- heavy rock, which should fall faster. 3. But Aristotle's theory would also predict that the light rock would hold back the heavy rock, resulting in a slower fall.

The motion of falling objects is the simplest and most common example of motion with changing velocity. The early pioneers of physics had a correct intuition that the way things drop was a message directly from Nature herself about how the universe worked. Other examples seem less likely to have deep significance. A walking person who speeds up is making a conscious choice. If one stretch of a river flows more rapidly than another, it may be only because the channel is narrower there, which is just an accident of the local geography. But there is something impressively consistent, universal, and inexorable about the way things fall.

Stand up now and simultaneously drop a coin and a bit of paper side by side. The paper takes much longer to hit the ground. That's why Aristotle wrote that heavy objects fell more rapidly. Europeans believed him for two thousand years.

Now repeat the experiment, but make it into a race between the coin and your shoe. My own shoe is about 50 times heavier than the nickel I had handy, but it looks to me like they hit the ground at exactly the same moment. So much for Aristotle! Galileo, who had a flair for the theatrical, did the experiment by dropping a bullet and a heavy cannonball from a tall tower. Aristotle's observations had been incomplete, his interpretation a vast oversimplification.

It is inconceivable that Galileo was the first person to observe a discrepancy with Aristotle's predictions. Galileo was the one who changed the course of history because he was able to assemble the observations into a coherent pattern, and also because he carried out systematic quantitative (numerical) measurements rather than just describing things qualitatively.

Why is it that some objects, like the coin and the shoe, have similar motion, but others, like a feather or a bit of paper, are different? Galileo speculated that in addition to the force that always pulls objects down, there was an upward force exerted by the air. Anyone can speculate, but Galileo went beyond speculation and came up with two clever experiments to probe the issue. First, he experimented with objects falling in water, which probed the same issues but made the motion slow enough that he could take time measurements with a primitive pendulum clock. With this technique, he established the following facts:

All heavy, streamlined objects (for example a steel rod dropped point-down) reach the bottom of the tank in about the same amount of time, only slightly longer than the time they would take to fall the same distance in air.
Objects that are lighter or less streamlined take a longer time to reach the bottom.

This supported his hypothesis about two contrary forces. He imagined an idealized situation in which the falling object did not have to push its way through any substance at all. Falling in air would be more like this ideal case than falling in water, but even a thin, sparse medium like air would be sufficient to cause obvious effects on feathers and other light objects that were not streamlined. Today, we have vacuum pumps that allow us to suck nearly all the air out of a chamber, and if we drop a feather and a rock side by side in a vacuum, the feather does not lag behind the rock at all.

How the speed of a falling object increases with time

Galileo's second stroke of genius was to find a way to make quantitative measurements of how the speed of a falling object increased as it went along. Again it was problematic to make sufficiently accurate time measurements with primitive clocks, and again he found a tricky way to slow things down while preserving the essential physical phenomena: he let a ball roll down a slope instead of dropping it vertically. The steeper the incline, the more rapidly the ball would gain speed. Without a modern video camera, Galileo had invented a way to make a slow-motion version of falling.

b / Velocity increases more gradually on the gentle slope, but the motion is otherwise the same as the motion of a falling object.

Although Galileo's clocks were only good enough to do accurate experiments at the smaller angles, he was confident after making a systematic study at a variety of small angles that his basic conclusions were generally valid. Stated in modern language, what he found was that the velocity-versus-time graph was a line. In the language of algebra, we know that a line has an equation of the formy=ax+b, but our variables are v and t, so it would be v=at+b. (The constant b can be interpreted simply as the initial velocity of the object, i.e., its velocity at the time when we started our clock, which we conventionally write as v_o.)

(source: http://www.lightandmatter.com/html_books/lm/ch03/ch03.html)

Although strict technical application of the definition excludes motion of an object subjected to other forces such as aerodynamic drag, in nontechnical usage, falling through an atmosphere without a deployed parachute, or lifting device, is also often referred to as free fall. The drag forces in such situations prevent them from producing full weightlessness, and thus a skydiver's "free fall" after reaching terminal velocity produces the sensation of the body's weight being supported on a cushion of air.

Examples of objects in free fall include:

A spacecraft (in space) with propulsion off (e.g. in a continuous orbit, or on a suborbital trajectory going up for some minutes, and then down).
An object dropped at the top of a drop tube.
An object thrown upwards or a person jumping off the ground at low speed (i.e. as long as air resistance is negligible in comparison to weight).

Technically, an object is in free fall even when moving upwards or instantaneously at rest at the top of its motion. If gravity is the only influence acting, then the acceleration is always downward and has the same magnitude for all bodies, commonly denoted $g$ .

Since all objects fall at the same rate in the absence of other forces, objects and people will experience weightlessness in these situations.

Examples of objects not in free fall:

Flying in an aircraft: there is also an additional force of lift.
Standing on the ground: the gravitational force is counteracted by the normal force from the ground.
Descending to the Earth using a parachute, which balances the force of gravity with an aerodynamic drag force (and with some parachutes, an additional lift force).

Uniform gravitational field without air resistance

This is the "textbook" case of the vertical motion of an object falling a small distance close to the surface of a planet. It is a good approximation in air as long as the force of gravity on the object is much greater than the force of air resistance, or equivalently the object's velocity is always much less than the terminal velocity (see below).