Earlier quoted context omitted.
Add air resistance into the mix, and denser materials do fall faster. Coins vs. napkins. Plums vs. crumpled balls of paper I'd actually take the lesson the other way. It's hilariously tough for model-makers to acknowledge real-world noise that prevents their theoretically precise models from delivering reliable results.
I've done so many physics questions that explicitly instruct me to disregard air resistance... Reminds me of Feynman's speech: https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education > There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. > The nu…
> “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.”
In my experience there are almost just 2 types of motivated students: those who want to understand the content of the course and those who want a good grade and ultimately graduate.
There's often a conflict of interest between them. For example the first group wants to learn more, ask more questions, go deeper. The second group sees this as a threat because the additional content may now be on the exam as well. And they often misunderstand this behavior of the first group as just being teacher pleasers/pets.
Or from own experience: when you tell the prof that he accidentally started to cover the same topic that we already covered in the last lecture (because you're there to learn more), you will annoy a lot of people who hoped to get one fewer lectures to study in the course. Less content, less effort, same grade.
You hear the first group having passionate discussions on physics or programming over a beer, while the other group discusses all the latest info of which prof is how demanding, what the grading criteria are, what the deadlines are, which departments you should or should not take courses from, where they have mandatory presence, who does multiple choice tests and who does free-text exams.
I don't have much to conclude, just an observation.