Just an observation of something that's pretty common but which still surprises me - the ability of people to believe things that they
know are true because an expert told them so, despite being surrounded by observational evidence to the contrary.
The falling objects thing is obviously the example here. Consider a) a leaf fluttering slowly to the ground and b) dropping something heavy on your foot. Who hasn't observed both of those things? Yet there are people who are very familiar with both phenomena, but who still insist that everyday objects all fall to ground with the same acceleration - because a school teacher once told them about an Italian dude throwing pizzas off a tower (or something).
As for Galileo and the tower of Pisa, he was essentially trying to disprove the Aristotelian view that acceleration in freefall is proportional to mass (and he never suggested that in real life objects fall at the same rate through air - I expect he'd seen leaves falling and had dropped things on his foot too). And he almost certainly never dropped anything off the tower - it was just a thought experiment based on considering how two objects would fall if they were connected by a piece of string. (see
Wikipedia)
As another example, people repeated and believed Aristotle's apparent assertion that flies have four legs, when it was almost painfully easy to just look at one and see. (The claim that Aristotle said so may well have been a misunderstanding of what he meant, but it didn't stop people believing it without checking it.)
And didn't someone once prove that a moving bicycle can't fall over? I don't know about you, but I'm going to discard the wealth of personal evidence I have to the contrary, and start every ride with that assumption
