Figure 1
Today Google is remembering Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday with an animated logo that shows an apple falling from a tree.
This made one of your classmates (@Link Hyrule) wonder if the apple actually fell with a constant acceleration of -9.8m/s/s.
I captured the fall several times using CamStudio (a free screen capture program) and analyzed the video in LoggerPro. (I used an apple height of seven centimeters.)
Unfortunately, the dots in Figure 1 show that the apple’s position is not modeling a constant acceleration.
I’ve tried this several times and got a variety of results. As you can see in this graph, the apple starts off a little better in the beginning but it jumps around too much in the end.
Google may not have been able to set the apple’s acceleration or CamStudio isn’t doing an accurate screen capture with the school’s slow computers.
Further investigation may be required.
Update: Things are looking a little better. I recaptured the drop at home with a faster computer and better software. With an eight centimeter apple, we get a little closer.
However, we still can’t get a constant acceleration and it again drops off at the end. I can only assume that air resistance and updrafts are causing the apple to behavior this way. I wonder what the air density on the Google home page is? 
Update 2: I passed this on to another physics teacher; he could not observe a constant acceleration either. He looked at the acceleration after the bounce. The apple should have the same acceleration after the bounce as it did during the fall. No such luck. Nice try Google. I guess it’s the thought that counts.
January 4th, 2010 at 6:36 pm
So if you knew the exact size of the apple. Or something for the scale, then you could figure out exactly how far the apple fell from the tree. haha get it?
January 4th, 2010 at 9:08 pm
maybe the gravity of the google website is based on another planet? (pandora?) lol
January 4th, 2010 at 10:52 pm
wow, i’m suprised google actually set the acceleration. that’s really cool. it’ s too bad it didn’t work in class
January 4th, 2010 at 11:41 pm
@coolforcoulombs
Well, it was closer but I wouldn’t say it works. Check out Update 2
January 5th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
The apple could be falling through a viscous medium, which exhibits a lot of turbulence as the apple nears the surface. As long as we’re assuming Google isn’t on Earth…
January 5th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
I think that it was very clever of who ever it was, to question the acceleration of the apple. Its funny that from our computers and perspective, the apple experiences no contant acceleration. However, is it possible that google uses high tech computers where it experienced contant acceleration for them but when transfered over to common computers it is simply glitched or not fast enough? If this is not a possibility, after reviewing the data you collected, I am pretty proud of google for getting it that close/accurate. We should write to google and show them your data and experiment… maybe they’ll work harder because they know we’re watching(calculating?)!!!
January 5th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
I agree with Anna about petitioning Google to make it for future years actually accurate with proper acceleration. I wonder what Google programmers used to create the fall weather it was manualy moving the apple down, taking a frame, move it again like a stop motion or if they used some equasion to do it automaticly. if it was an equasion you would think that it is just getting slowed down by the computer running the java scricpt. but it would make more sense for it to be manual animation due to the unevenness of the spacing.
January 6th, 2010 at 7:26 am
Whenever i logged on to google the other day it appeared to me that the apple wasn’t falling smoothly… whenever i would log on it would look like there were a bunch of pictures linked together like a stop motion film that made the apple appear falling. If this is the case, im sure that thats the reason why it wasn’t falling at a constant acceleration due to gravity
January 7th, 2010 at 11:32 pm
Yeah, i too feel that this problem needs to be fixed for the future by google. The whole purpose of the apple event in Newton’s life was to spark the idea of gravity, and google couldn’t even get the gravitational constant to be correct on their page!? I mean come on! Anyways, other than that, the thought was really cool and it was interesting to see a google home page that involved motion. I hope to see some improvement for the next google theme involving motion though.
January 19th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Has anyone ever looked at the chance that the apple reached its terminal velocity. Maybe someone should analyze the falling apple until it hits a constant velocity. Maybe the acceleration is constant up until this point.