Could Galileo Be Wrong?

C. Y. Lo
Applied and Pure Research Institute
7 Taggart Drive, Unit E, Nashua, NH 03060
October 2010

Historically, Galileo showed that objects of different weight would fall with the same speed toward earth. Thus,

Aristotle’s thesis that heavier matter falls faster is wrong. However, as Einstein pointed out, one cannot prove a theory

with experiments. Thus, it is not clear whether Galileo’s statement is always true.

Now, with the discovery of the charge-mass repulsive force, Galileo could be wrong, but Aristotle would be right.

Consider two charged particles such as the electron and the proton. The attractive force toward the proton is much larger

than the attractive force toward the electron since their masses have a difference of about 2000 times. However, the

charge-mass repulsive forces toward these two particles are the same because they have the same absolute charge [1].

Thus, the electron would fall slower than the proton. This difference should be observable in vacuum.

One may note also that a charged particle would emit electromagnetic wave and thus has a radiative reaction force.

However, this is negligible for the free fall. Moreover, for the same falling accelerations this slowing down would also

make the electron falling slower since the mass of proton is much larger. Moreover, since the neutron has no charge, it

would fall faster than the proton and the electron.

Similarly, a charged capacitor would fall slower even though it remains neutral because of the charge-mass

interaction [1]. Therefore, the claim of Galileo is actually not valid although his observation is approximately valid. In

other words, the test of what the 1993 press release of the Nobel Committee [2] termed “the equivalence principle”

(which is actually only intimately connected with Einstein’s equivalence principle [3; p. 58]), the identity between

gravitational and inertial mass is valid only when the charge-mass interaction is absent.

Acknowledgments: This work is supported in part by Innotec Design, Inc., U. S. A.

Reference:

1. C. Y. Lo, Limitations of Einstein’s Equivalence Principle and the Mass-Charge Repulsive Force, Physics Essays 21
(1), 44-51 (March 2008).

2. The 1993 Press Release of the Nobel Prize Committee (The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm,
Oct. 1993).

3. A. Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity (Princeton Univ. Press 1954).