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The bowling ball isn’t falling to the earth faster. The higher perceived acceleration is due to the earth falling toward the bowling ball.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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I understand and agree with red's math, and I said no such thing as you put into quotation marks there.
Yeh tbh my bad Im a couple drinks in. All I know is that the guy who thinks the bowling ball doesn't technically fall faster is wrong (no idea if that's you or not) any doubters look at this equation (F = G(m1m2)/R2 ) for a couple minutes and come back to me.
In solidarity with whoever thinks I'm wrong I'll downvote my own comments losers
As to "what's falling faster" my point is still that everything's falling at the same speed, because the only non-arbitrary reference point to measure things from is the centre of gravity of the whole system, earth, feather, ball, all of them together.
Well it may still be arbitrary, but at least it's not geocentric or feathercentric or ballcentric. All three can be unhappy with the choice which means it's fair.
Flip that reference point to the earth though and yes the ball is approaching ever so slightly faster than the feather (side note: is our earth spherical or are we at least making it an oblong?). Flip it to the ball and the feather is falling a lot slower towards it than the earth is. Which is probably how I should have started explaining this: The mass difference between feather and earth with respect to the ball is so massive that it actually makes quite a difference while between feather and ball wrt. earth it's negligible.
Yeah man that wall of text and all is great. But like F = G(m1m2)/R2 is so much easier and quicker to read so I'm going with that