miso@sushi.com (miso) wrote in message news:<a4e9a35d.0309102022.b42cfd5@posting.google.com>...

Neglecting aerodynamics, f=ma works for all elements. I doubt there is
any truth to the story.

Here is a source of your story:
http://www.ufon.org/html/diamagnetics.html

I don't think that's it.

In the Earth's gravitational field, all materials appear to accelerate
equally according to Newton's laws. F=ma is a very clean mathematical
model. The question is, how closely does reality fit the model? If
there is some error it would be in the parts per million range and
people who aren't looking for these anomolies might chalk them up to
measurement noise.

How much do you trust what you were taught in school? In my case, too
much has turned out to be crap so I want to verify.

I don't have a vacuum pump, but it looks like Bismuth and lead balls
would be easy to cast and a steel ball bearing of the same shape would
be easy to buy. If they're painted they would have the same size and
surface texture. I think with three balls wind resistance would be
easy to compensate out of the measurements.

The detectors are the hard part. The ball isn't going to be dead
center so the point at which it breaks the beam isn't precise. I think
multiple beams might do the job, or a strobe that snaps a picture so
you can compensate for the offset.

My point is this: It's hard to actually do this experiment with a high
degree of precision. I mean, in a typical lab environment the ball
will be moving at 50 to 200 ips when you want to measure its position.
To get microsecond time resolution you have to measure the position of
the ball to within 50 microinches (.001mm) with microsecond
resolution. That's a lot of work and expense for such a mundane
experiment that everybody just knows won't yield interesting results.