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MotionLab
Drop something from any height — see exactly how long it falls and how fast it hits.
In a vacuum, all objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass — Galileo demonstrated this in the 1600s. The time to fall depends only on height and gravitational acceleration (9.81 m/s² on Earth). Air resistance complicates things for feathers and parachutes, but for dense objects the approximation is excellent.
Fall time goes as the square root of height — doubling the height doesn't double the fall time, it increases it by a factor of √2 (about 41%). This means the first few meters of a fall take proportionally longer than the last few, and impact speed grows faster than you'd intuitively expect.
Fall time (s)
4.515
d = ½gt², v = gt
What you entered
Time to fall: t = √(2h/g)
√(2 × 100 / 9.81)= 4.5152 sFinal velocity: v = g·t
9.81 × 4.5152= 44.2945 m/sDistance check: d = ½gt²
0.5 × 9.81 × 4.5152²= 100 mResult
Fall time (s): 4.515
An object dropped from 100 m takes 4.515 s to fall, hitting the ground at 44.29 m/s (159.5 km/h).