A stupid physics question

Requests for information (such as weapons, maps, history, grammar, spelling, outlining, ect) for your writing. Or where to post useful reference sites that you have found useful in writing. Anything from information research to writing guides.

Re: A stupid physics question

Postby XofderXofder » Sat Aug 24, 2013 4:52 pm

A person on the earth's surface is moving at roughly 465.4211339 metres per second. This is the speed they'd be moving at if the centrifugal force gravity stopped acting on them to constantly changing their direction into a circular path instead of a linear one. If you ignore the earth's own orbit of the sun the path the weightless man would take floating away from the earth is a straight line tangent to it. You can ignore the earths orbit to the sun as the curvature is so small over such a great distance it's effectively approximated to a straight line anyway meaning there's a very negligible difference to the speed at which the man pulls away from the earth.

So technically the man begins to move perfectly horizontal from where he became weightless on the earths surface. If you where to stand beside him though as it happened it would look as if he his simply going straight up. In a way the man is traveling both sideways and upwards due to the earths curvature. The earth's rotation is fast enough to counteract his sideways motion fairly well so it he's still on the same space of the earth( Also the reason why you land on the same spot when you jump :mrgreen: ). His upwards motion is due to the earth curving away from him rather than his linear velocity which is why he wouldn't shoot off from the earth at 465.4211339 metres per second. It would take about 3437.746771 seconds for someone to leave the atmosphere from sudden immunity to gravity ( or 57.29577952 minutes). So relatively to a person seeing him going upwards, to them and himself he'd be traveling at 58.17764173 metres per second into the atmosphere. That's from start to finish if no unbalanced external forces act upon him. So the second gravity stops you blast off into the atmosphere at around 130 miles per hour. Technically you aren't actually moving but since everything around you including the air is at the speed it's the same effect. Theory of Relativity and all that.

I'm not sure how good that is for the human body. Of course air resistance would come into it. It might actually emulate gravity for a bit because around 60 metres per second is a sky divers terminal velocity ( where air resistance and gravity cancel each other out and you retain the same velocity) but as you gained more downward velocity your relative deceleration would lessen which means while you do slow down the rate at which you do so lessens with along with your speed meaning you still might end up in space. So as long as you don't hit an airplane or are indoors it's a one way trip to space. Although if you were indoors or hit a plane you'd probably die from impact depending on the speed and even in a straight shot to space you'd probably die from suffocation or get messed up by the pressure before reaching the vacuum.

Your clothes and shoes might have enough mass to overcome air resistance and give proper downward velocity so you don't exactly 'blast off' but I'm not really sure. In theory they should I suppose given that they'll accelerate at 9.8 metres per second. I really don't know though.

I think I've done my math right but there's a lot of variables and unknown quantities. If you could actually nullify an objects gravity and study what happened it'd make for some great experiments. Still that 58.17764173 metres per second just seems weird, but it should be right.... I hope.
You can only look up when you notice you've been looking down.
XofderXofder
Senshi Cadet
Posts: 49
 

Re: A stupid physics question

Postby Cheb » Tue Sep 17, 2013 2:56 am

So the second gravity stops you blast off into the atmosphere at around 130 miles per hour.

No "blast off". You forgot the inertia, hence your calculation is wrong. Search for an error. As you picture it, the unlucky one suddenly gains kinetic energy from nowhere (in relativity to the ground). The talk was about a sudden disappearance of one of the forces acting on the subject.

Forget about speeds and transform all numbers into accelerations. Then calculate FORCES acting on the unlucky weightless one and go from there.

a = w^2 * R, where
w = 7.29 * 10^-5 s^-1
R = 6356800 m

a = 0.034 m/s^2 !!!

For a human weighing 80 kg this translates into a force of 2.7 kilograms.

Air weighs 1,225 kg/m^3, human volume is 0.08 m^3, force = 0.08 * 1.225 = 0.098 kg (a vacuum balloon effect)

The total force accelerating you upwards will be around 3 to 4 kilograms. I doubt you'll gain more than 20 or 30 kph, due to air resistance (it only has to negate 4 kg of force). It will be a very slow and agonizing lift to your death, lasting for many hours until you finally die.

P.S. That's for the equator.
Proud owner of 1.5 kilograms of Germanium transistors
Cheb
User avatar
Moon Senshi
Posts: 1549
 

Re: A stupid physics question

Postby Cheb » Tue Sep 17, 2013 7:19 am

Sorry, my mistake. 2.7 *Newtons*. which means, 270 grams. Yeah, right. 270 grams from the centrifugal force plus 100 grams of floating how-they-call-it force from the air pushing you out like a vacuum zeppelin.

370 grams total. It's like a negative weight of an average pigeon. That would be the force accelerating you up. If its only your body that loses gravitational pull, your pants alone would probably weigh enough to hold you on the ground.
Proud owner of 1.5 kilograms of Germanium transistors
Cheb
User avatar
Moon Senshi
Posts: 1549
 

Re: A stupid physics question

Postby XofderXofder » Fri Oct 04, 2013 3:58 pm

Ahh..

I knew there was something wrong with it. It just seemed way to weird. Still it'd be kinda cool if you did 'blast off'.
Thanks for clearing it up. :D
You can only look up when you notice you've been looking down.
XofderXofder
Senshi Cadet
Posts: 49
 

Previous

Return to Fic Research

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users