It hasn't been so long ago, I believe, that we read in the papers that our Air Forces had bombed the Italian city of Pisa. That news probably brought to our minds a mental pic­ture of the Lean­ing Tower and we probably wond­ered if it had been hit. From the best information I am able to obtain, the Leaning Tower still stands. It is a great curi­osity in the archi­tectural world. But it is also a re­minder of one of the most interest­ing experiments that has ever been performed.

     In order to get the setting for this experiment, we go back to the 4th Century, B.C., and the Greek philos­opher, Aristotle. He was one of the first great scientists, and contrib­uted much to medicine and astron­omy; in fact, for 2,000 years follow­ing his death his writings were the only natural science books recog­nized by educators. In the 16th Cen­tury, a young student in Pisa, by the name of Galileo, figuratively threw a monkey-wrench in the ma­chinery by questioning some of Aris­totle's statements.

     It was a common belief at that time that all scientific problems had been settled finally and conclusively 2,000 years previously. But Galileo wasn't satisfied with this. Later, when he was a young professor him­self, he had quite an argument with some of the older ones on the cor­rectness ot Aristotle's theory that a heavy weight will fall faster than a light one, and he offered to prove his point.