Moon hoax?? a simple test you can do to prove

[miker]

1. Go to YouTube and watch the "hammer and feather drop on the moon." 2. Count how many seconds it takes for the hammer to hit the ground. I count 1-1&1/2 seconds which would depend on your height. 3. Now go out and drop a hammer or any other object and count how many seconds it takes to hit the ground. 4.It will take 1-1&1/2 seconds depending on your height.
The time is exactly the same whether you're here or on the moon??? Logic dictates the moon drop had to be here on earth because the moon has 1/6 the gravity of earth, so it should have taken 6 or more seconds to hit the ground. I can't believe it took this long for me to realize that!! I think I was focused on the feather which I now believe was made out of a metal.

[Allan F]

If it takes 1.5 seconds for your hammer to drop here on Earth, you are either impossibly high (as in tall OR high) or standing on a balcony.

A ONE SECOND DROP in Earth gravity will give you almost 5 meters of vertical movement.

[onebigmonkey]

An experiment I can try myself?

OK...

I dropped my geological hammer from shoulder height. I am 1.96m tall.

Any questions?

[bknight]

Firstly you need a much more accurate timer to do the calculation. Secondly, put the numbers into s_f=s_o + v*t + .5 * a t².  With known heights and gravities it is easy to calculate what the times should be.  They will match a more accurate timer.

[onebigmonkey]

For the record it took 0.88s to travel from my shoulder height to the cushion.

[bknight]

For the record it took 0.88s to travel from my shoulder height to the cushion.

That's pretty close to 1.5 sec.

[miker]

I'm a little confused by you guys. How long are you saying it takes a rock hammer or carpenters hammer to hit the ground when dropped from chest high?? I'll admit that judging the time is guess work, but I still judge the moon hammer drop and my hammer drop as being very close in time and nowhere close to 6 times different.

[Mag40]

Logic dictates the moon drop had to be here on earth because the moon has 1/6 the gravity of earth, so it should have taken 6 or more seconds to hit the ground. I can't believe it took this long for me to realize that!! I think I was focused on the feather which I now believe was made out of a metal.

Your so called logic is not good enough. You need to understand the equation for gravity. Six times less gravity equates to 2.45 times the speed. The actual figure is the square root of the difference. ie. sqrt of 6.

This should help you:

[onebigmonkey]

I'm a little confused by you guys. How long are you saying it takes a rock hammer or carpenters hammer to hit the ground when dropped from chest high?? I'll admit that judging the time is guess work, but I still judge the moon hammer drop and my hammer drop as being very close in time and nowhere close to 6 times different.

Did you bother to watch the video I posted? I didn't have to judge the time, I could count it precisely.

I've done what you suggested - I experimented for myself. Where's yours?

[tikkitakki]

For the record it took 0.88s to travel from my shoulder height to the cushion.

Are you 100% sure? That's 3.8 meters.
I count 14 or 15 frames at 25 fps (0.56 to 0.6 s) which correspond to more realistic 1.54 to 1.77 meters.

[onebigmonkey]

For the record it took 0.88s to travel from my shoulder height to the cushion.

Are you 100% sure? That's 3.8 meters.
I count 14 or 15 frames at 25 fps (0.56 to 0.6 s) which correspond to more realistic 1.54 to 1.77 meters.

I went on Adobe Premiere's timestamps on when it left my hand (03:19) and when it hit the ground (04:07). The original mp4 clip was 29 fps, recorded on the camera I use for my bike, but the exported wmv is 25 fps. Your frame count is correct though. There is going to be a margin of error because the real time event is recorded in tiny segments, so your time estimate is just as valid!

Scott is 6 inches shorter than I am (though wearing thicker soles than my bare feet), held the hammer so that the head was well below his hand (mine was horizontal), and held the hammer well below mine (which was level with my shoulders). All in all his hammer fell a shorter distance.

Meta quibbles aside, my main point really is that it is well under the 1 second claimed by the OP, and my geological hammer hits the ground well before Scott's. Sadly I have no feather available. The nearest available fluffy item was my cat, who resisted attempts to be co-opted into the experiment.

[smartcooky]

1. Go to YouTube and watch the "hammer and feather drop on the moon." 2. Count how many seconds it takes for the hammer to hit the ground. I count 1-1&1/2 seconds which would depend on your height. 3. Now go out and drop a hammer or any other object and count how many seconds it takes to hit the ground. 4.It will take 1-1&1/2 seconds depending on your height.
The time is exactly the same whether you're here or on the moon??? Logic dictates the moon drop had to be here on earth because the moon has 1/6 the gravity of earth, so it should have taken 6 or more seconds to hit the ground. I can't believe it took this long for me to realize that!! I think I was focused on the feather which I now believe was made out of a metal.

The suggestion that an object on the moon should take six times longer to fall than the same an object on the  earth is completely wrong. Intuition might tell you that, but as people who know anything about science and mathematics will tell you, intuition is often misleading.

The acceleration due to gravity on the earth (at 1G) is 9.8ms²
The acceleration due to gravity on the moon (at 1/6th G) is 1.6ms²

"Aha!" you say, "that confirms it, 9.8 is about six times 1.6"

Well, you would be wrong. The key word here is "acceleration". Your intuition tells you that it would take six times longer because you don't understand the difference between velocity and acceleration. An object falling in a vacuum never stops accelerating while it falls. An object falling on the earth does not fall six times faster than in the moon, it accelerates six times faster. 

Lets look at this from a perspective of a car accelerating along a road (lets ignore air resistance for convenience's sake). The formula for displacement is...

½at²+v_st-d=0

where

a = acceleration
t = time
v_s = starting velocity
d = distance

If the car accelerates at 1G (9.8ms²) from a standing start, it will take 9.06 seconds to do the quarter mile.

If the car accelerates at 1/6G (1.6ms²) from a standing start, it will take 22.43 seconds to do the quarter mile

This is NOT six times longer, it is only 2.5 times longer

[Apollo 957]

I'll admit that judging the time is guess work, but I still judge ....

There you have it. You're not running an ACCURATE timer. You're 'judging' and 'guessing'

Film it with a PRECISE timer in shot so you can play it back in slow motion

[onebigmonkey]

His other problem, of course, is taking that fragment of EVA footage and ignoring the context in which it sits: a very long live TV broadcast featuring countless other examples of low gravity zero atmosphere materials behaviour.

That and not actually having done the experiment he says other people should.

[gwiz]

4.It will take 1-1&1/2 seconds depending on your height.

If it takes that long, you should be the world's tallest man! 

An object on Earth drops 5 m in 1 s and 11 m in 1.5 s.