All of this preceded the 1564 birth of Galileo Galilei. Two years later, mathematician Giambattista Benedetti questioned why two balls, one made of iron and one of wood, would fall at the same speed. In 1551, Domingo de Soto suggested that objects in free fall accelerate uniformly. By 1544, according to Benedetto Varchi, the Aristotelian premise was disproven experimentally by at least two Italians. The 6th-century Byzantine Greek philosopher and Aristotelian commentator John Philoponus argued that the Aristotelian assertion that objects fall proportionately to their weight was incorrect. įurther information: Physics:History of gravitational theory Most historians consider it to have been a thought experiment rather than a physical test.
:19–21 The basic premise had already been demonstrated by Italian experimenters a few decades earlier.Īccording 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).
Comparison of the antiquated view and the outcome of the experiment (size of the spheres represent their masses, not their volumes)īetween 15, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (then professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa) is said to have dropped two spheres of the same volume but different masses 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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