This is Nasa's space power facility near Cleveland, Ohio, and it is the world's biggest vacuum chamber
it's used to test spacecraft in the conditions of outer space and
It does that by pumping out the 30 tons of air in this chamber until they're about 2 grams left
This I've got an eccentric construction. Which is part of this history
it was built in the 1960s as a nuclear test facility to test nuclear Propulsion systems and
That meant that they built it out of our [mininum] to make the radiation easier to deal with
aluminium is not the best thing the strongest material to build a vacuum chamber out of so they built out a
Concrete skin which is part radiation shielding and part an external pressure vessel so this thing can take
The Force that's present on the outside when it's pumped out to the conditions of outer space
Galileo's experiment was simple he took a heavy [object] and the light one
And drop them at the same time to see which fell fastest
Now in this case the feathers fell to the ground at a slower rate [than] the bowling ball because of air resistance
So in order to see the true nature of gravity we have to remove the air
It takes three hours to pump out the 800 thousand cubic feet of air from the chamber
We drop to millet or in the last 30 minutes, but once it's complete. There's a near-perfect vacuum inside
6104 Manual 10 percent [orbit] Station One go for [Drive] PCB
30-1 pressure set point at 240 PSI. We are go for drop
and nine eight seven six five four
cameras on two one release
Yeah, look at that. They came down exactly this
Exactly, not gonna silent exactly just a feathers. Don't move nothing look at that. That's just brilliant
Isaac Newton would say that the ball and the feather fall because there's a force pulling them down
gravity
What einstein imagined the scene very differently?
The happiest thought of his life
was this:
the reason the bowling ball feather fall together
is because they're not...
...falling
They're standing still
There is no force acting on them
at all
He reasoned that if you couldn't see the back gravity
There'd be no way of knowing that the ball and the feathers were being accelerated towards the Earth
So he concluded:
They weren't