urtalkinstupid said:
I don't think they fall at the same rate.
Why don't you do an experiment? It doesn't require much in the way of apparatus to show this to be false. All objects fall with the same acceleration in a vacuum. This very demonstration is shown yearly to thousands of freshmen at universities around the word... but wait, you haven't even completed high school yet.
I think they would fall faster in respect to their original acceleration. If they objects are being pulled towards the Earth center within this vaccum, they are being pulled depending on their weight.
You are correct that the force exerted a body falling in a gravitational field depends on its weight. As you can see by the equation
F = G\frac{M m_g}{r^2}
the force on the object is proportional to m_g, it's "gravitational mass."
On the other hand, the acceleration of an object is also dependent on its mass, as you can see from the equation
F = m_i a
where m_i is the "inertial mass."
If m_g and m_i were different, two bodies of different masses would
not fall with the same acceleration. You do experiments to determine whether or not these masses are the same, and indeed experiments have been done even up into the last decade to verify that they are in fact the same. They can be shown to be the same to a few parts per trillion IIRC, which is as close as you can get to "identical" in experiment.
Now, assuming m_g = m_i = m, you can combine the two equations:
G\frac{M m}{r^2} = m a
G\frac{M}{r^2} = a
You can see that the acceleration of a body does not depend on its mass (or therefore density, which is mass per unit volume) at all. A feather and a hammer fall with the same acceleration. This is what the "pull theory" predicts, and this is what is observed in experiment.
Your push theory, on the other hand, predicts that denser bodies fall faster, and this is not what is observed. Your theory is incorrect, and glaringly so.
What is the distinct characteristic of matter that makes one object attract to another?
Mass (and energy) curve space, and free-falling masses move along geodesics (the straightest possible paths) in such curved space.
- Warren