Final answer:
Galileo Galilei first formulated the Laws of falling, establishing that the distance an object falls is proportional to the time squared, undermining Aristotelian physics and informing Newton's laws of motion.
Step-by-step explanation:
The quantitative "Laws of falling" were first formulated by Galileo Galilei of Pisa, Italy. He discovered that the distance an object falls is proportional to the time squared, starting from rest. This was a significant advancement over the previously accepted Aristotelian idea that objects naturally slow down and stop unless acted upon by a force. Galileo's insightful observations led to the principle that objects retain their velocity unless an external force such as friction acts upon them. These findings were crucial in the development of Newton's laws of motion, particularly the First Law, which states that an object will remain at rest or in uniform straight-line motion unless acted upon by a force.
Galileo's experiments with falling objects, including the legendary dropping of two objects of different masses from the Tower of Pisa, challenged the notion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. While it's not clear how Galileo measured the time of the objects' falls without a stopwatch, his conclusions led to the understanding that in the absence of air resistance, objects would fall with the same acceleration. This understanding was later encapsulated in Sir Isaac Newton's Second Law of Motion and his Universal Law of Gravitation, which states that the force acting upon (and therefore, the acceleration of) an object toward Earth is inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the center of Earth, observed at the surface as 9.8 meters per second squared (9.8 m/s²).