Imagine 2 objects, 1 is a 50kg dumbbell and 1 is a 1g feather, how is it possible that they will fall and touch the ground at the same speed and time assuming they are dropped from the same height?
I must be understanding this completely wrong.
Edit: I definitely understood it completely wrong because I did not know it only applied to objects in space. That makes much more sense.
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It’s possible because acceleration due to gravity close to Earth is mass independent. This can be derived from Newton’s laws, basically the extra force necessary to accelerate a heavy object is exactly cancelled out by the fact that gravity pulls harder on heavier objects.
But your intuition isn’t wrong in the example you gave. A feather will not always hit the ground at the same time as the weight. But it’s not because gravity is working differently on them, it’s because there is *air resistance* that significantly slows down the feather, but doesn’t really affect the dumbbell.
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