If you drop an object, it will fall. It's a motion that we’ve all seen hundreds of times. We’ve also all seen plenty of the moon, which makes one complete orbit around our planet every 27.3 days (as ...
It’s been demonstrated since the 1500s that, when falling toward a certain body, objects fall at the same rate. Everyone from Galileo in Pisa to David Scott on the moon demonstrated that. But what if ...
Our motion perception is remarkably well tuned to detect small changes in speed and direction. For example, soccer goalkeepers need to precisely judge the speed, direction, and curvature of an ...
Centuries before anyone pointed a telescope at the sky, Isaac Newton figured out how gravity works. He showed that any object with mass pulls on every other object—a result that explained falling ...
This is a fantastic question, and the answer highlights some of the most counterintuitive aspects of the theory of general relativity. The short answer is no, but let’s delve deeper into a few of the ...