If an elevator falls while you're on it, (a free-fall), do you float like astronauts do?

Question

Imagine If it falls for like 5 minutes from a very tall building, high as Mt. everest, would you fly or float in it?

Answer 1

Yes, indeed.
The effective value of 'g' acting on any body that's moving up or down can be found using the relation :
g(eff.) = g + a, ------ (1)
where 'a' is positive for a body moving up with an acceleration 'a' and negative for it moving down with an acceleration 'a'.

In the case of a freely falling body, 'a' = 'g' (and you must consider it with a negative sign). Substitute, this value in eq.(1), and you get :
g(eff.) = g + (-g)
= 0
which implies that a body (the elevator, in this case) will experience no force of gravity, so you will float like an astronaut when this happens.

Answer 2

Yes, you would. Just like the coyote in the cartoons when he is falling from a cliff next to a rock. As long as both he and the rock are in free fall, they both are weightless. I am assuming no air resistance, which changes a true accelerating free fall into a constant speed drift down. But even mount Everest is too short for a 5 minute free fall. After 5 minutes of free falling you have gone 272 miles. This is because in a true free fall, with no air resistance, you speed up by 32 feet per second for every second you are falling. After 5 minutes, which is 300 seconds, you will be falling at 32 times 300 or 9,600 feet per second. That is 6,545 miles per hour!

Answer 3

Elevators don't free fall because Otis made a grabber that hangs on if the elevator cable snaps. The real problem, if you are falling in a box that is in a free fall, you would float only if the box wasn't involved in a medium like air, where there is resistance to terminal velocity (Maximum in that medium). You would get about the same effect as skydiving from an airplane, without the wind resistance. Astronauts practice in an airplane called the "vomit Comet". This plane flies in a sort of wave pattern. It flies up and when it gets to the desired altitude, determined on how long it can dive before it is going so fast that it cannot recover, it noses over and dives. This is while it is still going up, so passengers float. The plane flies over the appogee (top of curve) and then starts going down. The length of time it can go down is again how long the plane can recover from the dive. Then it does it again. I think that the weightless time is typically 20 seconds. See here for more details.
http://www.space.com/news/spacetv_vomitcomet_010323.html

Answer 4

You must "pay" dearly at the end of any "free" fall. To simulate free fall in outer space, the elevator would have to be released with no remaining rail friction within a perfect vacuum. Spacecrafts orbiting the earth (in near perfect vacuum) are always falling toward earth (otherwise they would move straight ahead into outer space). Within an elevator that is simulating a space orbit, you could move about weightlessly by pushing or pulling on any available surface within reach except you would need to accelerate your own mass to change its direction. You could "float" as long as you and the elevator car are accelerating toward the center of the earth unrestrained but would soon reach terminal velocity (terminating all occupants from a height of Mt. Everest!).

Answer 5

Not really. You would be falling at the same rate as the elevator. Air resistance in the elevator is not a factor at all because relative to the elevator you are not moving at all. Artificial weightlessness can be experienced at the top of a parabolic flight path as when a jet climbs steeply and then begins to sharp dive. This method is used to give astronauts a sense of what weightlessness is like, but the elevator sensation is different. In the elevator you are just falling downward. If the elevator were shooting upward at a high rate of speed and then lost power and began to decelerate and then began to accelerate downward, then right at that point where the elevator reached the peak of its upward motion you would feel weightlessness for a few seconds. The elevator would have to accelerate upwards under power and then begin to accelerate downward under power to achieve this; merely falling back under gravity would not do it.

Answer 6

Wow. The number of wrong answers is amazing. Yes, you would float and have the sensation of zero gravity. Only air resistance on the elevator would make it so you might think there is a force. This would gradually increase as the elevator got to its terminal velocity. Once the elevator got there, you would feel a full gravitational force.

Answer 7

Yes, you would infact experience "weightlessness". This is because the elevator would behave as an "aeroshell" and would block the air from affecting your free-fall.

Many scientists and engineers use what are called "drop-towers" which basically drop experiments from high places in either a vaccuum or an aeroshell. These experiments are used to measure the effects of microgravity on a system.

Answer 8

The elevator would have to be allowed to free fall so that you and the elevator would fall at the same speed. Your point of reference would be the inside of the elevator so you would have the sensation of floating. Unfortunately, your other senses would detect that both you and the elevator are falling.

Answer 9

Yes this is correct. You will feel weightless exactly in the same sense orbiting astraonauts do.

Essentially an orbiting astronaut is in free fall. However he has enough velocity vertical to his fall so he "catches up" with the courvature of the earth and never falls down.

Answer 10

Objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass! Drop a marble and drop a bowling ball from the same height. They will hit the ground at the same exact instant.

The elevator would have to fall *faster than gravity* for people to float in it because the people are at rest with the elevator.