What if gravity worked differently?

[yogi]

So does any other explanation - air friction, water friction, whatever, is not involved in Galileo's conception... just as the equating of Inertial force To G force won't give you an accurate measure of the fall time in a liquid.

 

[JesseM]

So does any other explanation - air friction, water friction, whatever, is not involved in Galileo's conception..

That's irrelevant, all that matters is that it's logically possible the gravitational force would pull different masses at different speeds, even without friction from any medium. It doesn't work that way in the real world, but logically there's no reason it couldn't. Instead of the gravitational force on an object being proportional only to its mass, it could be proportional to (mass - volume), for example, in which case there'd be something analogous to the buoyancy term even in the absence of any medium.