T Tradition has it that Italy's greatest scientist disproved

Aristotle by dropping different weights from Pisa's Leaning

Tower. Galileo is said to have observed the pendulum swing
of the chandelier in the cathedral next door.

Acceleration, free-fall and inertia

At Padua, Galileo carried on his investigation of the simplest

movements that we can observe. We should take this step first, he
believed, before we try to understand the complexity of the world. He
felt it would be possible to give an exact mathematical description of
such movements, in terms that would be as certain and as precise as a
theorem in geometry. Galileo believed that proceeding in this way, he
could arrive at scientific laws of motion. He considered that all his
predecessors had been vague and uncertain, because they would not
use mathematical methods. But his program would depend on treating
time as a geometrical dimension. He had already established that in
empty space all bodies would fall at the same speed. But how do they
fall, and how do they speed up as they fall?
First, he defined this speeding up, or acceleration, in a way that
seemed to make obvious sense, as a motion that "from the point of
rest, adds to itself equal moments of swiftness and equal times".
From this he could deduce that "the spaces passed over in natural
motion are in proportion to the squares of the times", as he wrote in
1604 to his friend the Venetian theologian and physicist Paolo Sarpi
(1552-1623). This is essentially the "law of fall" that begins any
modern textbook of dynamics.
To test his conclusions, Galileo devised a crude experiment in which
a ball was allowed to roll down a groove in an inclined plane. The
extremely short time intervals were measured by the human pulse and
by the quantity of water that escaped from a large vessel. Such
methods were not ideal but Galileo felt sure that he was being accurate
enough to confirm his theoretical arguments, even though he was
ignoring the effects of friction.
Galileo also found that a ball falling at the end of a piece of string
presented the same sort of problem. From his theory it followed, he
believed, that the ball would now oscillate in equal times, through
very small arcs, depending only on the length of the cord. He made
measurements which confirmed his hopes. In this way he had now
discovered the law of how a pendulum works.