FYI: If I Fell Through The Earth, What Would Happen In The Center?

Don't the basic laws of gravity dictate that one could hypothetically find a place where the 'center' is equi-distant from both ends....jump in and simply step out on the other side..when velocity would again be zero?

@Guitalife: Maybe in an airless chute, but air resistance will slow you down, meaning if it was truly equidistant, you'd never reach the other end before falling back the other way (and continually moving back and forth until air resistance stops you at equilibrium in the center).

-IMP ;) :)

Center of earth: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7TA-5-1JkY

why has this article been removed from where it was originally published on this site, last week, and been republished here?

@Guitalife and IceMetalPunk: Yes, Guitalife in an ideal situation that is correct, and yes, IceMetalPunk, in a slightly more realistic, but still unrealistic situation, you are correct. How cool of an amusement park ride would that be? "Travel to the other side of the world and back!!!"

I think you have to look at this problem in a couple of ways:

If you fell through in a vacuum, you'd reach some kind of maximum speed based on the fact that when you started, the gravitational acceleration would be 1g but that acceleration would decrease until you reached the center of the Earth, where it would drop to 0g. However, because there would be no wind resistance, you would continue through the center at your maximum velocity which would then begin to slow due to pull from the Earth, starting at 0g and gradually increasing to 1g on the opposite side. Theoretically, you would come to a stop on the other side, right at the surface and begin falling back in again. This would continue forever.

Without the vacuum, wind resistance would limit your fall to terminal velocity which would not allow you enough momentum to continue all the way back out the other side. You'd go back and forth for a while (decreasing in distance and speed) until settling in the center of the Earth to stay there forever.

Weee enjoy the ride.

"feeling heavy again"? You callin' me fat?

Well now duh the earth is spinning. So at the equator you would start out at about 1000 mph circumferential and zero radial. At the center you would be moving very fast radial but zero circumferential. Thus you would decelerate by 1000 mph circumferentially on the way down.

You might also be sucked towards a microscopic black hole in some sort of squishy swirling motion to use technical terms. What happened next would be different depending on where the observer was (or part of the observer)

Oh yeah, if you weren't in a shaft and 'fell through' in a vacuum (sortof a vacuum with mass). Then can anybody guess what would happen next? A spiral? Would centripetal and centrifugal forces balance somewhere? Would you go into some kind of elliptical orbit inside the 'sphere'? Would you spiral back out somewhere?

What if you dropped from 30 deg. latitude? Your circumferential velocity would be less, and not perpendicular to the radial acceleration on launch. Then what?

I remember an article somewhere stating that theoretically, in a vacuum tunnel, a "train" could ferry people and goods from one point on the Earth thru to another in like 42 min using the previously stated gimmick. They were talking about transocean pipelines for quick transport. I don't even want to know how many years that would take to drill.

you know the non-gravitational part would be really cool if it were true.

Ya got another problem, too.

If you drop any where other than the north or south pole, you have to deal with angular momentum.

If you drop at the equator, you are zipping along at over a thousand miles an hour. As you fall, you would constantly be slamming into preceding wall of the tunnel.

Once you pasted the center, if any angular momentum (and/or body) is left, then it would slam into the receding wall for awhile - but, not very long or far.

If you could run unbelievably fast, you might be able to maintain ~ 1G perpendicular to the wall - as you zipped down the hole... Breaking the sound barrier could be a problem.

Robert1234 There is and can be no such thing as a microscopic black hole. To be a black hole, it has to have a minimal mass sufficient to stop light from exiting the "surface". That's pretty much the definition of a black hole. That amount of mass is not "microscopic" is size, but at least the physical size of our sun, likely much greater. When it gets smaller than that, there isn't enough mass there to act as a black hole and thus can't be considered as one. Microscopic black holes are a physicists idea of a joke.

Michael Mc Donald

The title doesn't match the story. Nowhere in the article does it say "fall" or "jump" to the center of the earth. The article deals with what happens dead center. Zero gravity. And climbing back out is oversimplified, of course, as mentioned they don't talk about the angular momentum.

And Robert1234... Micro "black holes" do exist. However they tend to "evaporate" very quickly... As for them being "black" they are still singularities and absorb anything small enough to go into their maw. I believe a physicist guy, his name is Stephen Hawking, you may have heard of him, has a chapter in A Brief History Of Time called "Black Holes Ain't So Black".

Jeesh everyone here is so unrealistic - if there were really to be a tunnel, you wouldn't smash into the sides of have to worry about angular momentum, because whoever created the tunnel is obviously some engineering mastermind and took all of that into account - you don't drill a hole through the earth just to do it wrong.

A point not considered in the article and the responses is that the center of the Earth/Moon system is thousands of kilometers from the geometric center of the Earth. Therefore, you would not be weightless at the center of the Earth, but would feel the force of gravity to the barycenter.

this is only the basic stuff if you fell through a tunnel to the center of the earth so everybody stop making all of the about what they forgot to say!!!!!

The article is wrong. Using the article's assumptions, that at the center of the earth the earth would pull equally and you would experience weightlessness completely leaves out the gravitational effects of the moon. You would essentially become a human compass, your new down would be wherever the moon was in relation to your body and this would of course track the moon as it rotated around the earth.