Empirical Earth · Test It Yourself

Smoke, dust and pollen — the things that refuse to fall

The claim

“Smoke and dust hang in the air instead of falling, so gravity cannot be pulling on everything.”

What is measured

Small things fall slowly, and the smaller they are the slower they fall, because drag rises as the particle shrinks. Fall speed goes with the square of the radius, so a speck a hundred times smaller settles ten thousand times slower. Room air moves thousands of times faster than that. The particle never stops falling; it is just being outrun.

What would show this is wrong

dust that settles on the underside of a shelf as readily as the top, or a sealed still chamber in which smoke never reaches the bottom, or a measured fall speed that does not scale with the square of the particle radius. Air-quality science, clean-room engineering and every vacuum cleaner ever sold depend on the opposite.

Sources

  1. Stokes’ law and particle settling. The terminal velocity of a small sphere in a viscous fluid is v = 2(ρ_p − ρ_f)gr² / 9μ, so settling speed scales with the square of the radius: a particle link
  2. Brownian motion. Air molecules strike a suspended particle unevenly, producing a random walk; Einstein’s 1905 analysis related the diffusion to molecular motion and was used to confirm the e link
  3. Departures from the ideal sphere: the Cunningham slip correction. Very small particles fall faster than Stokes’ law alone predicts, because they are comparable in size to the mean free path link
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