yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Galileo the Scientific Parrot


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Okay, so we're at the University of Sydney to experiment with Dr. Phil's dead bird. He's a famous scientist, this guy. He helped us out back in, uh, the 16th century, I think. Uh, the 17th century, isn't it? 17th century, 1600s.

Thank you! Galileo was, uh, was discussing gravity. A lot of people, of course, thought that different things fell at different rates. But Galileo said, "No, no, no, no, no! Gravity is the same for all bodies, no matter how heavy or light."

Um, so we're going to prove that right now, aren't we? Okay, let's give it a shot. Yeah, so, um, young, uh, Galileo here is going to lend us a feather. The feather's very light, but it's still going to fall at the same acceleration as this coin made of metal.

So you're telling me they're going to accelerate together towards the ground? That's right! And you know, I don't believe you. How could you? I'm a scientist!

All right, so let's do the experiment. Let's see what happens. Yeah, one, two, three... That's actually going upwards!

All right, so what was happening there? Obviously, they didn't accelerate down at the same rate. Well, maybe there's some other factors going on here. What do you reckon?

Maybe! Or maybe it's, uh, it's the dead bird's fault! Maybe it's the dead bird's fault; he was blowing up, blowing its air. Maybe we need to get rid of the air. What do you reckon?

Okay, let's get rid of the air and see what happens. As it happens, we've got a vacuum pump here. Okay, so if we put this feather and this coin in here, seal it up, then we can pump all the air out.

All right, let's do it! So we're sucking all the air out now, coming out of the pipe, down the tube, out of here, through the air. So, so, uh, we're really getting rid of most of the air, so there'll be no wind resistance as the feather falls this time.

It's kind of like a vacuum cleaner, but it really sucks! All right, so, uh, let's try it out. Let's see if, uh, they accelerate at the same rate now. Right? You ready for this?

Yep! One, two, three... Wow! They did fall at the same rate!

More Articles

View All
John Preskill on Quantum Computing
And what was the revelation that made scientists and physicists think that a quantum computer could exist? It’s not obvious, you know, a lot of people thought you couldn’t. Okay. The idea that a quantum computer would be powerful was emphasized over 30 ye…
Anti-Federalists and Brutus No. 1 | US government and civics | Khan Academy
You first learn about American history; it sometimes seems like it might have been a very easy or somewhat obvious transition from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, but it was not. It was a very vigorous debate. As we’ve talked about in p…
The Beauty of What We Just Don't Know (A Philosophy of Trust)
There’s this human tendency to find explanations for the things that we don’t understand. This tendency has been the birthplace of folklore and creation stories that are cornerstones of many religions. Imagine living in the tribal age, gazing at the stars…
Finding height of a parallelogram
The parallelogram shown below has an area of 24 units squared or square units. Find the missing height. So, here’s the parallelogram. This side has length six, this side has length five, and we want to find the missing height. They gave us the area, so p…
Classifying shapes by lines and angles | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy
Which shape matches all three clues? So here we have three clues, and we want to see which shape down below matches all three of these statements. So let’s start with the first clue. The first clue says the shape is a quadrilateral; “quad” meaning four-s…
RC natural response intuition (1 of 3)
Now we’re going to cover a really important circuit in electronics: it’s the resistor-capacitor circuit, or RC circuit. In particular, in this video, we’re going to talk about the natural response of an RC circuit. The natural response is what happens whe…