Which object will be slowed the most by air resistance softball ping pong ball bowling ball or a bullet?

Answer 1

The more carefully a scientist tries to answer this question, the more trouble he'd have with it. The problem is the part where it says "... slowed the most ..."

That's a concept that seems intuitively very easy to understand, but it's scientifically about as foggy as you can get. How do you measure how much a moving object has been slowed? Are we supposed to look for the greatest instantaneous negative acceleration? The greatest numeric reduction in speed? The greatest fractional reduction in speed during the total flight? The greatest fractional reduction in momentum or in kinetic energy?

Now that we've pointed out the difficulty, we're going to sweep the whole matter under the rug, and simply say to the questioner: We know what you mean.

Of the items on that list, the ping pong ball will be slowed the most by air resistance.