If you cut a whole right through the center of the earth...?

Question

then jumped through, would you come out on the other side of the Earth upside down to the ground or standing normal to the ground, and if you were upside down, how far would you keep falling?

Answer 1

You would probably be pulled back the other way towards the core of the earth by gravity and get stuck at the center (being pulled from all sides). My question is, would the presssure under that rock just crush you the closer you get to the center of the earth? This is irrelevant since you would be killed by the heat of the core of the earth.

Answer 2

The Earth would need to be solid (obviously) and preferably not rotating. If the Earth was rotating, your mine shaft would need to be exactly along the Earth's axis of rotation, otherwise you'd bang against the walls of your mine shaft as you fell. It would help if there was no air inside the mine shaft, otherwise air resistance would be a problem. So you'd better wear a space suit.

Assuming you've fulfilled all these conditions, then if you dived down the mine shaft, you'd accelerate down towards the centre of the Earth. As you descended, your weight and acceleration would both decrease, both becoming zero at the centre of the Earth, where your speed would be at its maximum. You'd keep on going (due to your momentum) in a straight line, but now you'd be going up, so you'd be decelerating and your weight would gradually be increasing (throughout the whole journey from one side of the Earth to the other, though, you'd be in freefall, so you'd always "feel weightless"). When you reached the surface, you'd stop, but you'd need to hold onto something, otherwise, you'd fall back down again and, after a while, return to your starting point (where you would stop momentarily and then start falling back again, beginning another oscillation).

As you fell, the force on your body would be GMm/(r squared), where G is the universal gravitational constant, M is the mass of the material of the Earth beneath you (the material of the Earth above you exerts no force on you - the inside of a spherical shell is a weightless environment), m is your mass, and r is the distance between you and the centre of the Earth (as you fall further, M decreases, becoming zero at the centre of the Earth). Your acceleration would be GM/(r squared).

If you dived down the mine shaft head down, once you had reached the other side of the Earth you would be standing upright.

I once read that in this situation - assuming uniform density of the material of the Earth - the falling man would oscillate according to "simple harmonic motion" - i.e. the acceleration of the man would be proportional to the distance of the man from the centre of the Earth. A mass bouncing up and down on the end of a spring is another example of simple harmonic motion (SHM).

We can show that this situation is SHM, because M = (4/3) x Pi x (r cubed) x density, and if we substitute this equation into the acceleration equation above, we find that acceleration is proportional to r. The defining formula of SHM is a = - kx, where a = acceleration, k is a constant and x is displacement.

Assuming the Earth has a uniform density of 5464 kg/(m cubed), your maximum speed (at the centre of the Earth) would be 7.9 kilometres per second, and your journey from one side of the Earth to the other would take 42 minutes. (I worked this out using the standard SHM equations a = - (omega squared) times displacement; maximum speed = omega times maximum displacement; period of one complete oscillation = (2 times pi) / omega).

As long as you didn't touch the walls of the mine shaft, you'd be quite safe, but watching the walls rush past at a few kilometres per second might be scary. Maybe, to be on the safe side, the mine shaft should be a few miles wide and your spacesuit should have position-correcting mini-rockets.

The biggest practical problem with this would be the mine shaft, which would have to withstand pressures much higher than those that crush diamond! It would have to be a very high-tech mineshaft, using technology that doesn't exist at the moment (assuming such technology is possible). Drilling a mine shaft right through the Moon might be possible, though, and drilling a mine shaft right through a 50-mile-diameter asteroid would be fairly easy.

Answer 3

As far as I know, if you made a way through the center of the earth to the other side and fell in, supposing you would survive (and that earth is actually a sphere, there are no losses of energy etc), you would be in talantosis from the one to the other end of the way forever.

Answer 4

You would burn up on the way through the first time and as the natural forces decay your momentum your ashes would come to rest in the center of the earth after several oscillations.

Answer 5

Although this idea is only hypothetical;
if you remain still i.e. do not revolve you will emerge upside down.
But the point is that you will never come out of the whole.
Consider gravity pull, just give it a thought, you will find out that in reality you will oscillate from one end to another end of the hole.
You will never be able to come out of it yourself without application of any external force.

Answer 6

if you could survive the heat and pressure, you'd fall to the center, than have to climb up the other end to the surface. (gravity pulls towards the center of the object; earth)

Answer 7

why would you want to know that? IF would never happen because its impossible you would burn and die and then theres gravity you wouldent fall gravity would pull you andit just wouldent work.

weird question