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Rishi Garg

Mr. McQueen

Physics, 6th Period

26 October 2007

A Seventeenth-Century Galileo Experiment

The following are graphs made from the data of the ball rolls, first with

normal y-values, then with the y-values squared.

At first glance, I noticed that the average slopes of both graphs are

negative. If one averaged all the values, and made one line for each graph, I

believe that the line would be fairly straight. I first thought that meant that

the average acceleration was also a constant value. However, after

calculating and graphing the average accelerations, I knew that I was wrong.

Disregarding the last value, as it did not match the pattern and is

therefore an outlier, the line looks as if it has a less negative slope as it

progresses. This means that the average acceleration of the ball was in fact

not constant at all, therefore disproving Galileo’s definition of acceleration.

Scientifically, this makes sense. The ball’s acceleration was equal to

the force of gravity, which is approximately -9.81 m/s2. Since acceleration is

measured in units per units per units, gravity pulled the ball down at an

initial velocity, then added a certain velocity to the initial velocity for every

second that had passed while the ball was rolling. The graph of position vs.
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time had a constant slope because each time the ball was rolled from 35 cm

higher than the previous roll, a certain velocity was added to the previous

velocity due to gravitational pull.

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I didn’t see any surprises in my data. I did notice, however, a lot of

data which didn’t seem to fit the general pattern of the rest of the data. I

credited these anomalies to the fact that the timing and release of the ball

was not exactly the same every time. Sometimes we used a ruler to release

the ball; sometimes we simply used a finger. If we were to do this experiment

again, we would use the ruler to release the ball in every trial. Also, when we

were timing the roll with the water clock, we switched the person who

operated the clock halfway into the experiment. Since different people

operate the water clock in different ways, this odd incident probably altered

our timings. Next time, we would have the same person operate the water

clock for the entirety of the experiment.