By Anupum Pant
When a bowling ball and a feather, or anything for that matter, is dropped under gravity, in theory, they should come down at the exact same time. However, due to the air resistance experienced by a feather, that doesn’t really happen. A feather takes far longer to come down because the air resistance it experiences is much greater than a falling bowling ball.
What happens when you take the air out – drop both of them in vacuüm. Until now, no one had endeavoured to do this in such a scale. Brain Cox visited the world’s largest vacuüm chamber to conduct this seemingly silly, but profound experiment. 30 tons of air was evacuated from the huge vacuüm chamber, which actually is a 50+ year old nuclear test facility. And then the bowling ball and the feather were dropped in high vacuüm. Here’s what they found…