Testing the independence of gravitational acceleration from mass: a comparative analysis of free-falling objects near Earth’s surface

The goal of this experiment was to determine whether mass affects the acceleration during a free-fall near the Earth’s surface. We dropped a 2.9 kg bowling ball and 0.142 kg baseball from a window 5.0 m off the ground; we filmed a trial for each ball and used the framerate to calculate how long it took each to hit the ground, under the specific conditions of low altitude and negligible air resistance for the dense objects. We found that both dense objects reached the ground at nearly equal times: these results support the principle, from Galileo, that mass does not affect acceleration when falling near the Earth’s surface.