Inertia

For many of you this page will be an introduction into the physics concept known as inertia.

To put it simply, inertia is the force you feel pushing you into your seat when you are accelerating in a car and the same force you feel when slamming on the brakes. It is the force every object feels when it is accelerating or decelerating. Albert Einstein posited that a man standing in a rocket that was accelerating vertically at 9.8m/s2 would be unable to tell the difference between standing in that accelerating rocket and standing on the planet Earth whose gravitational acceleration rate is also 9.8m/s2. Formally this correlation is known as the Equivalence Principle.

One interesting fact about the Equivalence Principle is that an object's inertial and gravitational masses are believed to be equal which results in objects of different masses falling at the same rate. This was demonstrated in the Apollo 15 Moon landing in 1971 where astronaut David Scott dropped a hammer and a feather at the same time. The reason feathers fall slower on Earth is due to wind resistance. On the Moon there is no atmosphere and therefore no wind resistance.

The late Boyd Bushman was a Lockheed Martin Senior Scientist with many patents under his belt while at Lockheed. Bushman claimed publicly in a science email list in the late 90s and in the documentary "From Here to Andromeda" that he had conducted magnet free-fall experiments from 59 feet in a Lockheed building and that they fell at different rates than ordinary objects. Bushman claimed that he repulsively coupled two magnets (two magnets that push each other away) and performed repeated free-fall experiments with it and a non-magnetic control both using tennis balls for the shells.

Bushman claims witnesses at ground level claimed over and over that the control landed first and the magnet last. There is no hard data such as measurements of the free-fall times or video recordings of the drops. Bushman did not put forward a reason for the effect nor did he ever discuss conducting magnet free-fall experiments with a single or two attractively coupled magnets.