On December 15, 2001, Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa reopened its doors to tourists after a team of experts spent 11 years and $27 million to keep it from tilting so much it might fall over. Even before it was finished 800 years ago, the Leaning Tower of Pisa - a masterpiece of medieval architecture - began to topple, shaken by earthquakes and sinking slowly into the unstable soil. Follow the decade-long search for a solution to correct the lean and save the unique building.
NOVA: Fall of the Leaning Tower
* Take a look back at a myriad and often misguided attempts to slow, halt, or ideally reverse the lean in NOVA’s History of Interventions.
* Visit Pisa with this QuickTime VR image, which shows the famous Leaning Tower, Cathedral, and other buildings from the center of the Field of Miracles in NOVA’s Pisa Panorama.
* Get a sampling of Galileo’s thought experiments and conduct virtual versions of his experiments, including the one in which he shows, by dropping cannonballs of different weights, that all objects fall at the same rate in the NOVA’s Galileo Games.
