Between 1589 and 1592, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (then professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa) is said to have dropped two spheres of the same volume but different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass, according to a biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani, composed in 1654 and published in 1717. The basic premise had already been demonstrated by Italian experimenters a few decades earlier. According to the story, Galileo discovered through this experiment that the objects fell with the same acceleration, proving his prediction true, while at the same time disproving Aristotle's theory of gravity (which states that objects fall at speed proportional to their mass). Most historians consider it to have been a thought experiment rather than a physical test. Background The 6th-century Byzantine Greek philosopher and Aristotelian commentator John Philoponus argued that the Aristotelian assertion that objects fall proportionately to their weight was incorrect. By 1544, according to Benedetto Varchi, the Aristotelian premise was disproven experimentally by at least two Italians. In 1551, Domingo de Soto suggested that objects in free fall accelerate uniformly. Two years later, mathematician Giambattista Benedetti questioned why two balls, one made of iron and one of wood, would fall at the same speed. All of this preceded the 1564 birth of Galileo Galilei. A similar experiment was conducted in Delft in the Netherlands, by the mathematician and physicist Simon Stevin and Jan Cornets de Groot (the father of Hugo de Groot). The experiment is described in Stevin's 1586 book De Beghinselen der Weeghconst (The Principles of Statics), a landmark book on statics: Let us take (as the highly educated Jan Cornets de Groot, the diligent researcher of the mysteries of Nature, and I have done) two balls of lead, the one ten times bigger and heavier than the other, and let them drop together from 30 feet high, and it will show, that the lightest ball is not ten times longer under way than the heaviest, but they fall together at the same time on the ground. ... This proves that Aristotle is wrong.Asimov, Isaac (1964). Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Galileo's experiment At the time when Viviani asserts that the experiment took place, Galileo had not yet formulated the final version of his law of falling bodies. He had, however, formulated an earlier version