The Leaning Tower of Gingin is our pride and joy here at the Gravity Discovery Centre. It is an awesome feat of engineering.
The Leaning Tower is an impressively engineered steel structure, standing at 45 metres tall and held in place by 180 Tons of concrete.
Leaning at an extreme angle of 15 degrees our Tower may very well be the “leaniest” purpose built tower in the world. Its model and inspiration, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, leans at just 5.5 degrees in comparison.
The Tower was built to inspire Visitors to take a new look at science and present the opportunity to get involved in some hands-on experiments of their own based around the Galileo’s 1590’s theories.
A safe, thrilling climb will take you to the highest platform of the Tower – where you’ll be rewarded with breathtaking views across the Wallingup Plains all the way to the Darling Scarp.
The Leaning Tower is just one of the attractions included in your admission to the Gravity Discovery Centre and Observatory.
Tower Admission only can be purchased for a fee of $6.50.
In about 350 BC the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, said that heavy things fall faster than light things and for almost two thousand years everybody believed him.
Fast forward to the 1590’s and Galileo, once a student, then later a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa, was the first to say let’s not just believe what the ancients told us, let’s try it out.
In popular culture it is believed that as a student, Galileo dropped items such as cannon balls, bowling balls and feathers from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to test his hypothesis that; If you were to drop two weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa they would hit the ground within 2 fingers’ height of each other – questioning what the ancient philosophers had declared?
Galileo was correct!
Everything does fall at the same speed, not factoring in air resistance.
Come and test Galileo’s theory for yourself!
Drop a pair of water balloons (provided by GDC on entry) and see if they hit the ground “two fingers’ width apart”.
