And I had this thought, so maybe somebody can chime in with your theory. What if the Earth was half a sphere, leaving one side totally flat? When you got to the edge, would you just fall off? If so, where would you fall since there would be no “bottom”. Would you just continue falling down into space? Would gravity be the same regardless so you would just continue walking along the edge not feeling anything different than usual?
While the same meteor shower is occurring this weeked, that article is from 2004. It peaks tomorrow night through Monday morning though you should still be able to see meteors tonight.
Got to love those “good” meteors. They’re so much nicer and tend to miss your house and car!
As for your question, if you suddenly took away half of the world, the other half would kind of crumble, the atmosphere would be a mess, and there probably wouldn’t be any human survivors. If any air remained after a day or two, the climate would be destroyed, and our orbit (assuming the other half of the world disappeared) would take us out toward Mars and who-knows-where (a physics student). It would get very cold!
If you want to assume an Earth made out of something that would hold its shape, we would simply lose our atmosphere. It would basically suck in either example, especially if you’re from the “other” half of the world!
I’m not sure if I’m falling for one of those old freshman physics debates here, but I’ll share my thoughts on Terry’s gravity question:
Gravity will work no matter what the shape of the earth is. For the spherical earth we’re familiar with the lines of gravity are pretty much uniform all around the sphere, all pointing straight into the surface at a 90 degree angle. For the half sphere, (hemisphere), the center of gravity is shifted closer to one side of the spherical half, and the gravity lines near the edges of the flat side will point to the surface at a sharp angle. This results in the humans trying to walk there to lean at the same angle to keep their body in line with the force of gravity. No one would fall off. Living near the edges would just be really weird until we got used to it.
Perhaps more interesting: what would the effects be on atmospherics, weather, climate, etc? Would the word “atmosphere” still apply to the air mass that clings to such a planet?
Of course in real life if we removed half the earth like this the remaining half would crumble under the force of gravity and try to form a new smaller sphere. The actual result would likely be a big mess for those of us living there at the time.
(ooops, posted almost simultaneously with John Foss’ answer)
Here is my gravity question… If somebody drilled a straight hole the went all the way through the earth passing through the exact center and out the other side, what would happen if you jumped into it? (assuming that the hole stayed there and the earth didn’t crush it or anything…)
Would you just stop in mid air when you go to the very center?
Would you pass the center and start going up(away from the center) until gravity pulled you back down and past the center again, so that you would keep going back and forth until you lost your momentum? (like a bouncing ball)
My guess is that you would be going so fast you would go a little bit past center of gravity and gradually slow down granted the lave molten metal didn’t kill you or something else.
discarding the fact that it would pull itself back together, the “center of gravity” would be somewhere in the middle of the semi-sphere so it would feel weird at the edges but around the ceter of the flat would be no difference
Actually… if you could do it perfectly, you could end up at the center of that hole you dug with no way to get to the edges… I think tho that you would be pulled on equally from all the mass around you, not pushed into the center of gravity.
Gravity is simply that masses attract each other. If you placed a perfectly round piece of sand in the exact center of a hollow sphere, and had no other gravitational pulls… and no motion… the sand would stay in place. In the real world… that perfect state would probably last an infinitely small amount of time…
you would accelerate to the middle of the earth reaching your terminal velocity (burning yourself in the process) then you would decelerate as you passed the center and you would stop exactly at the edge of the tunnel at the height you droped in at.
Obviously the earth needs to be a perfect sphere etc…
I wish I could see the shower, but Alaskan summers even when it gets dark you can’t see stars. It’s still light enough you can walk around without a flash light.
a little pinprick of light with a long tail slowly moves across the sky, then nothing happens for like 20 mins. then the neighbor peoples screams in their sleep…then yells at their 5 year old kid who just put a toad in their bed. then the street lights go on and you can’t see anything for another 20 mins.
when the street lights finnally go out, a few more pinpricks move across the sky.
You can’t have it both ways. You either get the air to “burn” you as you go too fast, or no air and you suffocate. With air, your terminal velocity is limited to whatever a skydiver does, which is dependent on body position (your aerodynamics). Then you would just fall for a long time. Fall carefully though, because if you drift to the sides (easy with air, by tilting yourself at an angle), it’s going to hurt when you make contact!
Assuming the hole remained empty of magma and all the other nasty stuff down there, you would cook as you fell, not unlike a bird on a rotissere. You would probably be dead by the time you reached the center, but then continue until your momentum ran out, and gradually come to rest at the center after a series of bungie-like oscillations.
The only way you’d return to the surface on the other side of the Earth is if the experiment is performed in a vacuum, to remove all air friction. Then you would want a space suit. That back-and-forth ride would go on for a really long time (assuming you never touched the sides)!
Is this easier for me because I never took a physics class? Every time people come in with their physics-class answers, they usually seem to leave out important elements of “the equation.”
BTW, anybody watch the meteor shower? I got woken up by my dogs at 3:00am, but forgot to go outside and have a look…
