Skip to main content

Extra Credit Blog

So What would Happen if we all Jump at Once? 

By: Meghan Henseler

Maybe you've wondered it before, maybe you haven't.  What would happen if everyone in the world jumped at precisely the same moment?  Even with the amount of people on the earth, if everyone jumped at once in their own space, there would be no net force on the earth.  Everyone's jump starts and landings would cancel out each others.  This is perhaps less cool than many people would expect.  I was thinking that there would be more of a "the world would stop spinning answer," but according to studies done by Rhett Allain, this is not true.

The next logical question in a train of thought is "What would happen if everyone in the world jumped at precisely the same moment, in exactly the same spot?"  So picture this, everyone in the world flies into T.F. Green Airport, Providence.  Well really, in Warwick, but its PVD airport to make it easier for all the geniuses who think that Rhode Island is a part of New York.  (Fun fact: it's not) . The Earth is 6 TRILLION kg (thats a lot of kg), and there are 7 billion people on the earth, totaling about 363 billion kg.  Allain pondered this, and decided to physics it out to find the answer.  Assuming that all people could jump one foot in the air and that they were all jumping from the exact same spot, Allain used the laws of conservation of momentum and energy to find the answer.  
No, the world would not explode in a giant mushroom cloud.  In all reality, according to Allain's math, the jump would slightly push the world down (negative y axis, if you have everyone jumping up in line with the positive y axis).  By slightly push, it means that the Earth would have a recoil speed of 2.6*10^-13 m/s.  To put this into perspective, that's a hundredth of the radius of one hydrogen atom.  Woot.  Very exciting.  That is definitely what we thought would happen when we had the whole world fly to Providence.  
Some people might think that its cool that the Earth moved that little bit.  Well, I'm (really Allain and his math skills) are here to rain on your parade.  By the time everyone landed on Earth, it would have moved back into its original position.  Thus making this whole experiment unnecessary.  If I'm being honest, it would be cool to meet people from all over the world, and I'm pretty sure that this would make a pretty cool video that would go viral because everyone in the world was there to experience it happening.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Physics of Black Holes...Or Lack Thereof

Isabella Jacavone To comprehend how the universe works, we must dwell into the most basic building blocks of existence; matter, energy, space, and time. NASA's  Physics of the Cosmos program involves cosmology, astrophysics, and fundamental physics intended to answer questions about the elusiveness of complex concepts such as black holes, neutron stars, dark energy, and gravitational waves. In this blog post, I'd like to elaborate on a subject that is very intriguing  to me; Black holes. And more specifically, what would happen if we got near one. A black hole is anything but a hole, but rather an immense amount of matter compacted into an extremely small area. A black hole is caused when, hypothetically, a star four times more massive than our sun collapses into a sphere no bigger than 600 square km. To put that in perspective, that's about the size of New York City. B lack holes were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which showed that when a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Physics of Sound Dampeners and Active Noise Cancellation

Physics of Sound Dampeners and Active Noise Cancellation Sound dampening foam panels in a recording studio. ANC headphones worn by pilots and/or passengers in consumer aviation aircraft.  Acoustic treatment of soundscapes has grown alongside the sound production industry. Whether through absorption panels, diffusors and cloud panels to treat a space or headphones placed directly over the ears of listeners, acoustic treatment comes in many forms. Environments are treated acoustically to absorb excess sound to prevent sound levels from crossing a threshold above which the desired goal cannot be had. Before getting into sound dampening, we must discuss sound. Sound is produced when an object vibrates (a form of oscillation) and temporarily displaces nearby air molecules causing a wave effect as the displaced molecules collide with their neighboring molecules. Sound waves are fluctuations in pressure as the initial displacement of molecules experiences collisions that in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Physics Behind the Rail Gun

Magnets and Magnetic Fields: Magnets are well known for their ability to repel and attract other magnets and various pieces of metal, but what people seldom understand are the physics at work that cause such occurrences. Magnets are everywhere, from within TV's and cellphones, to the Earth itself, and they are all producing magnetic fields. For a particle, a magnetic field can be defined to be "a vector quantity that is directed along the zero- force axis" with a magnitude equal to the dividend of the magnetic force and the product of the particle's charge and speed, and for a bar magnet, the field is best demonstrated as arcs going from one pole to the other. With that said, magnetic fields can also be created; the basic principle of electromagnetism is that the movement of electrons through a conductor produces a magnetic field in the region around the conductor. This is the fundamental principle behind the workings of the rail gun. Unlike a bar magnet, a ...
Post a Comment
Read more