Science in a world where your imagination is the only limit

You’ve got to love thought experiments because they succeed where other experiments fail by giving the answer to some of the strangest questions like ‘Can you power your sailing boat with your own breath?’ and ‘Can you reflect a bundle of light inside a room full of mirrors?’. One of the more famous thought experiments was the experiment of Galileo, an Italian scientist who lived in a time which still believed in Aristotle’s ideas about gravity.
Aristotle stated that when a heavy ball and a light ball were dropped at the same time, the heavy ball would reach the earth first, but Galileo didn’t agree, so he suggested a new experiment: why don’t we bind the two balls together and drop them simultaneously and think what could happen. According to Aristotle there where two options: either the lighter ball will slow down the heavier one and the two will hit the ground later then the heavy one or the combined weight of the two balls is more than the weight of the heavier one, so the combination will reach the ground first.
This paradox leads to a third possibility: the two balls hit the ground at the same time so Galileo concluded that all the objects on earth are falling with the same speed. He couldn’t prove it in real life but by doing the experiment in his thoughts, he tackled a problem that he couldn’t research with an experiment.