Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/astronaut-shows-what-happens-w.html
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You never hear this, but at high enough precision, this conclusion isn’t actually true. The hammer pulls the moon towards it a tiny bit faster than the feather does.
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but both are still travelling in straight lines through curved space-time, in spite of the hammer’s tendency to increase that curvature, no? 
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Dropping them at the same time further minimizes the effect, but the center of gravity of the hammer and feather is never in the exact same place - at all times the vector between the center of the moon’s gravity well and that of the hammer is a slightly different angle and magnitude than that to the feather (though the attraction between hammer and feather would slightly narrow that divergence in angles as they fell).
The effect is negligible at scales way below “world’s collide”, but it does exist. It’s just interesting to me that this thing “everybody knows” to be basic scientific fact hasn’t ever actually been true.
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Like the proverbial game of ‘telephone’ this story has been distorted over time. What Galileo actually said was that when he was hammered he felt as light as a feather.
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it was the hardest thing to fake in the moon landing videos. They used a Styrofoam hammer and a feather made of tungsten.
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I remember watchmaking this with my mom. And his surprise that it actually worked as predicted with a “How bout that!”
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I fully expected this to be a gag video with the hammer plummeting straight down, the feather drifting lazily towards the surface, and Mission Control reacting with “Holy F***, all our equations are wrong”.
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I love SMBC, and I’m reading this as a friendly response. But if I could respond a bit seriously… this scientific experiment is meant to teach the general public some basic principles about their reality (and maybe challenge some assumptions). If this isn’t exactly the context to get a bit pedantic, or to take a deeper look and to challenge some ideas, then I don’t know what is.
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If this isn’t exactly the context to get a bit pedantic
Why yes, this is exactly the place. In fact pedantry is even granted its own award. 
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Brian Cox did this at the NASA/Glenn vacuum chamber.
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Vacuum chamber! THAT’S how they faked it. Finally the last piece of the puzzle. Thanks, atl.
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Well…actually…The feather and the Hammer will never touch the moon because the atoms in each will repel each other due to the Pauli exclusion principle. /s
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Add to shopping list: More notecards, more yarn, more thumb tacks.
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True dat, Mr. Galileo, true dat!
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Totally - it’s an opportunity to explore the fundamentally indistinct boundaries between conceptual world maps / fields of knowledge.
This seems like a great explanation of what underlies the common assumptions Alfred North Whitehead identified as the fallacy of simple location.
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Thanks again! I’m also out of aluminum foil.
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He then also said, “Whew…iz hawt in here…”.
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I hope they autoclaved the shit out of that feather
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