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I have a question about gravity?
If you were to somehow hollow out the Earth's core, and somehow stop the Earth from collapsing into the hole, and sit inside the core in a kind of vacuum bubble (I'm being careful not to say air bubble as you would feel the air pressure), would you be able to feel a force acting on you? What would happen to your body? Would you not feel anything as gravity acts towards the particles and not the Earth as a whole? Or would you feel something?
7 Answers
- NomaddLv 77 years agoFavorite Answer
You wouldn't feel anything. You'd be in freefall, just like if you were in orbit. Gravity hasn't exactly been a force since Relativity, but even if you thought of it that way, the gravity from all sides would exactly balance out, so the net force would be zero.
- 7 years ago
It is not even necessary to remove the core theoretically to get the result: roughly the gravitational force would be 0 (I mean the Earth's force acting on you). Of course you will feel forces acting on you, theoretically a huge number of forces (every single object with mass has a force acting on you et vice versa), but of course not all of them are sensible. Practically, you would feel something with a high possibility, as the structure of Earth is not completely uniform - it might be noticeable, but maybe not. By the way, pressure: you would feel pressure only if there would be connection between the surface and the hole (of course temperature is a different question). As long as you have a stable "building" with no connection to the air mass, you would be able to set the air pressure inside manually (only the structure would feel the outside pressure).
- oldprofLv 77 years ago
As the uniformly dense hollow sphere called Earth puts an equal amount of mass, the source of gravity, all around you at the same distance from where you sit in the center, all the gravity field, g, forces would cancel out.
That is, for example, the pull from the north pole would cancel out the pull from the south pole, and the pull from the equator at the GMT meridian would cancel out the pull from the equator the direct opposite side of the sphere.
And when you summed up all the g's for all possible angles around you, you'd have SUM(g) = 0 because all the vectors have an equal but opposite vector and all cancel out. In other words, your net weight w = SUM(mg) = m SUM(g) = m0 = 0 is what you'd weight in the center of the hollow Earth. You'd be totally weightless and just float there in the center (until that fly lands on your shoulder and its impact force starts you drifting in the opposite direction).
- Anonymous7 years ago
so if you made a shell earth the same size and mass as the earth, but hollow, you could walk around on the surface just like you can now, but if you made a hole in the shell and jumped in, you could float around weightless inside. You would experience zero g inside and feel no gravity. Air pressure inside should be equal to the surface air pressure in theory.
I don't see why there would have to be a vacuum, air could flood in through any hole in the surface - if pressure inside became equal to pressure outside, then there would be equillibrium between air entering and leaving the hole.
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- billrussell42Lv 77 years ago
no, inside a hollow sphere there is no gravity, it cancels out. You would be floating in the vacuum.
Even when you get close to the shell, the pull from the other side cancels out the pull from the nearby shell.
Source(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem - Anonymous7 years ago
Its feel like freefall you not experience g and fly in air
- Tracy LoveLv 67 years ago
Gravity is a property of mass. You feel the effects of gravity proportionate to to amount of mass.