It IS acting on everything with equal force. But the bottom of the slinky is actually the end of a spring that is compressing while it is being dropped. So the bottom is coming up at the same rate it is dropping, which makes it seem that it isn't moving at all because the forces are being cancelled out - until the top of the spring "catches up" with it, finishes the compression, and the whole thing drops.
The MORONS who made this video spouting off about "gravity messages not reaching the bottom of the spring" are either too stupid to live, or are educational disinformation agents.
Consider - the speed of gravity is FASTER than the speed of light. And this is easily proven. It takes light over eight minutes to reach the earth from the sun, yet the earth follows an exactly curving eliptic gravitational path of constant adjustments every micro-second to follow that ellipse, rather than simply go flying off into space.
So the sun "communicates" it's gravity to earth that fast, but gravity can't manage to "communicate" to the bottom of a slinky?
Like I said, too stupid to live.
It would seem that the easiest way to envision this is to realize that the entire Slinky has not been released all at once. That is, the top has been released but the tension in the Slinky continues to hold the bottom up as though the bottom was never released at all. This occurs UNTIL the Slinky contracts enough that there is inadequate tension to hold the bottom up any longer. Then the whole thing falls.
I like your answer; LOL
Pretty much agree. These guys may have too much education.
Thanks for your post.... Very interesting
Of course now I will be up the night... Thinking about it....
I never considered that gravity moved faster than light....
That conclusion is disputed, and I think most physicists operate on the basis that gravity changes don't propagate faster than light. The contrary "proof" that "delta gravity" (changes in gravity) are propagated instantaneously throughout all of spacetime depends on an impossibility, that the mass of the sun is able to drop "instantly," resulting in an "instant" change in the path of the earth through spacetime.
The paths of observed celestial objects tracks the predictions that flow from the speed of gravity being the same as the speed of light.
As for the slinky experiment, one can use classical (Newtonian) physics or engineering, disregarding all relativistic corrections, to explain the motions of the various parts.