Why do heavier masses fall faster than lighter masses?
It isn’t exactly that heavier masses fall faster than lighter ones. It’s easy to demonstrate counterexamples. Take two sheets of paper. Cut one in half. Crumple the half into a ball. Drop the ball, and the other (whole, flat) sheet of paper, from the same height at the same time. The ball clearly masses half what the whole sheet does, yet it will reach the ground much sooner. In a vacuum, everything falls at the same speed regardless of mass. Differences in fall speed in atmo are due to differences in wind resistance. This shows up as a force, acting opposite to the force of gravity. A given force due to wind resistance has a larger effect on a less-massy object than on a more-massy object (a = F/m, after all). So if you have two identically shaped objects of different masses, they will experience the same acceleration due to gravity (9.8 m/sec/sec). And (all else being equal) they will experience the same force due to wind resistance, but this wiil slow down the lighter object more th
