The acceleration of anything, including the four objects listed, completely depends
on the force acting on the object.
If you were to push on each of those 4 objects with the same force, then the
Bowling ball would respond with the least rate of acceleration, because its mass
is the greatest.
But if you could come up with sufficient force, you could accelerate the bowling ball
faster than a Golf ball off the face of a driver.
It is also true that if you drop all 4 balls near the surface of the Earth, they will all fall with the same acceleration. This is known as the acceleration due to gravity, which is approximately 32.2 feet per second per second. According to legend, Galileo proved this by dropping a light ball and a heavy ball off the roof of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Newton explained this about a century later with his law of gravitational attraction, according to which the weight of an object at a given distance from the center of the Earth is proportional to its mass. Another of his laws says that the acceleration of an object under the action of a force is equal to the force divided by the mass. These 2 laws together prove that all objects at the same distance from the Earth fall with the same acceleration.
Chat with our AI personalities