If I drill through the earth and jump in the hole will I stop when I get half way down?

Answer 1

No. Assuming there is no friction in the hole, you will be going fastest at the center and continue on through until you just barely come out the other side. Then you would go back and forth. Friction would gradually slow you down as you go back and forth and you would stop in the center eventually. Of course, the earth is also rotating, and that messes up everything since you'd just hit the side of the hole.

Answer 2

Assuming that you had a hole all the way through the Earth, and that it isn't going to collapse and we are ignoring heat, friction, etc ... then you would accelerate as you fell towards the centre of the Earth. Having reached the centre, you would continue, but decelerating as you sped back outwards to the opposite side. According to something which I read a considerable time ago, it would take 14 minutes for the journey. If it didn't pass directly through the centre of the Earth, then you wouldn't accelerate quite so fast, but the distance would be shorter, so the total journey time would be the same.
Obviously, no-one has actually done this :)

Answer 3

No - you will be moving fastest at that point. In the absence of friction, you would go on until you reached the other side of the earth, steadily slowing down. Your head would pop briefly out of the hole and then you would start the return journey! With no friction (if that were possible) you would keep doing this forever. The round trip would take about an hour and a half.

Answer 4

Ed Zotti explained this in "Know It All!" He explains at some length, but the captions on the illustrations summarize it adequately: "If there were no air (and thus no air friction) and you jumped into a tunnel that passed completely through the earth, you'd fall back and forth forever." "If there were air, eventually you'd come to a stop in the middle of the earth." This has to do with the changing pull of gravity and the slowing effect of air friction. Read the whole thing yourself.

Answer 5

If there was no air in the hole, your momentum would carry you all the way to the other side of the earth, and you would be pulled back down. You would continue oscillating indefinitely. But if there is air in the hole, some of your kinetic energy will be scrubbed off to air resistance, and dissipated as heat. You would overshoot the center, be drawn back, overshoot again, but you would lose altitude each time. You would finally come to rest in the center.

Answer 6

It depends on whether you mean halfway down the hole you dug or halfway through the earth. If you meant halfway down the hole you dug, you'll ge twice as far as that. If you meant halfway through the earth, assuming you could dig that far, yes. I would think it was impossible to go the other half back to the surface of the earth on the other side. Seems like gravity would stop you at the earth's core. Let me know when you try. God Bless you.

Answer 7

You will oscillate up and down around the center for a while.
You will be "well done" and crispy by then.
Provided your hole passes exactly through the center of gravity, which may not coincide with the geometric center.

Answer 8

False assumption: through..

Only the crust is solid, the inside is liquid... it wont stay out of the way.. and no know technology will hold the millions and millions of tons of liquid material from filling any hole you drill.

Answer 9

if the sering hot magma woudl not kill you, no you would not stop. you would continue to fall until you reached the other side, and then fall back down towards the center of the earth over and over agian, with each fall getting shorter, until you came to a rest at the centet of the earth.

Answer 10

no you would go past the center and then get shot back up then back down and so on..... but realistically you couldnt drill through and if you did you would be incinerated