Galileo’s plane

HOW

1. Place a ball in the upper position of the inclined plane.
2. Let it go and watch it roll down. Note the intervals between the highlighted, increasingly longer, sections.

WHY

A ball, rolling down the plane in a gravitational field, moves with acceleration. This means that it gains speed. For this reason, although the path sections it covers are greater and greater, the time taken to cover them is the same.

The lengths of consecutive sections maintain the ratios of consecutive odd numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7… This means that the second section is three times longer than the first, the third five times longer than the first, and so on.