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Comment by dia80 | Hacker News Reader

I know how this will turn out but my intuition is screaming otherwise.

One way of adjusting your intuition is to imagine the bowling ball and the feather standing still, and the ground coming up really fast and smacking them like a giant ping pong paddle. That's the only way I can get my eyes to agree with what the brain is thinking.

This is a great example of the 'Reality is Unrealistic' trope. The feathers just look so photoshopped falling next to the bowling ball, motionless, unfluttering.

I find it interesting that Brian Cox, the presenter and avowed scientist, obviously finds it so 'surprising' as well. Maybe that's the true meaning of being a scientist, though - he doesn't truly believe it until observing it with his own eyes.

>Brian Cox, the presenter and avowed scientist,

I think you mean "Brian Cox: Professor of High-energy Particle Physics, member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (who also presents popular science programmes in the UK)"

I think his career as a scientist deserves a little more recognition than "avowed".

And, as for his career in popular science he has been awarded both a Faraday and a Kelvin prize.

Sorry; I have every respect for Brian Cox, unlike others on this thread. I think I'm merely using totally the wrong word.

Sorry; I read "avowed" as a deliberate slur. I suspect some of the negativity about him here must have got to me. For an unknown reason I picked on your comment – I now see there are plenty worse :)

Still, I wish he'd use SI units, instead of things like 'cubic feet'.

I just watched this today - I've studied physics at Uni - I've done many experiments and known this result for a long-long time. However, this was actually the first time I've seen it myself.

It is awesome to see something so un-intuitive but so well known actually occurring - like if you could actually see quantum tunnelling happening. If you don't find the world awesome then doing physics has got to be a pretty hard slog.

But then I'm over-awed just about every time I use a mobile [aka cell-phone] or computer at the physics and engineering that's happening, the maths being applied, ...

A computing equivalent might be seeing Babbage's Difference Engine[1] or a valve based computer at work for the first time - you know the maths, the algos work, you know the science well enough (certainly in the mechanical computers) but seeing it all chug away and produce the result has a certain enthralling beauty. Maybe it's more like seeing a visual emulator [2] working on assembly code? You know it works, you know why it works (at some level at least) but it's doing it, it's awesome!

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiRgdaknJCg

[2] http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html

This does quite a nice job of it, for me :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A

That is awesome. I wonder how well that would do for teaching place values to primary school kids - despite having done binary/octal/hexadecimal and other types of number representations with my kids they still struggle to see how decimal uses places and how carrys work.

Just imagine the air to be made up of a bunch of tiny physical balls. The bowling ball does a good job of getting them out of the way fast but the feather trips and stumbles on them as it makes it's way. With none of these tiny air balls in the way both objects move unimpeded until they hit the earth.

I find it a bit easier to understand if I imagine similar size and shape objects with a different weight. Say, a bunch of balls with equal radius but different weights. Does a near-zero-weight ball fall with a near-zero speed? Of course not. Etcetera.

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