Coin and Feather Demonstration

The coin and feather demo shows how air resistance is the only factor affecting the speed of falling objects. When you remove all the air from a tube (thus removing air resistance), a feather and a coin will fall at the same speed and hit the ground at the same time. Note: in the slowed-down trial with an evacuated tube, you can see that the coin hits the ground ever so slightly sooner than the feather. This is due to the fact that we cannot form a perfect vacuum inside the tube, and thus have not completely remove air resistance as a contributing factor to the acceleration of the objects.