Freefall

I think we're all familiar with Tom Petty's song, "Free Fallin'," but we usually don't think of freefall as a physics concept. Free fall occurs when an object falls due to the effect of gravity only. When in free fall, an object has a constant acceleration of 10 m/s per second (which is the force of gravity). In free fall, there is no air resistance and weight does not matter. The video below explains free fall pretty thoroughly, including the example of Felix Baumgartner who set the world record for the longest free fall.

I think that video explains the concept of free fall really well, but I am including this second video which is a demonstration of free fall- the experiment is conducted with a feather and a coin in a vacuum. My physics teacher conducted this experiment in class and I was really excited to find an easy-to-follow video of the same experiment.



I hope this clears up free fall for you!