Museo Galileo
italiano
Virtual Museum
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Galileo's law of falling bodies
Galileo's law of falling bodies

Galileo (1564-1642) was the first to determine, at the start of the seventeenth century, the law of constant acceleration of free-falling bodies. The law states that the distances traveled are proportional to the squares of the elapsed times. In other words, in equal successive periods of time, the distances traveled by a free-falling body are proportional to the succession of odd numbers (1, 3, 5, 7, etc.).