Hey all,

 

just taking more tangents from my revision again and thought about the following:

 

ok so the world makes one full rotation in 24 hours, which means it spins 15 degrees in 1 hour etc etc.

 

so if i was to jump vertically in the air and hover above the ground for 1 hour and then falls back down the same line an hour later would i be displaced 15 degrees horizontally? whichi guess physically is about the size of france.

 

i was only wondering this because im off to america in the summer and the flight there and back take basically the same time.

 

anyway cheers for any input!

 

rob

so if i was to jump vertically in the air and hover above the ground for 1 hour and then falls back down the same line an hour later would i be displaced 15 degrees horizontally? whichi guess physically is about the size of france.

As long as you're part of Earth's atmosphere you're going to rotate with it. You would hover for an hour and come back to Earth more or less in the same spot unless your jump took you outside the atmosphere. The Earth would not rotate out from under you.

When you jump, you keep your angular momentum so you will almost follow the Earth around.

 

I say 'almost' because angular momentum is

[math]L=m \omega r^2[/math] (where m is your mass, [math]\omega[/math] is the angular speed and r is the distance from the centre of the Earth).

So when you jump, your r gets slightly bigger while L (and m) stay the same, meaning that [math]\omega[/math] must get slightly smaller. So you will lose a little angular speed and fall a little behind, but unless you can jump really high this is rather negligible.

 

A more interesting question would be: what happens if you make a long jump from the equator, heading north?

it would also pay you NOT to have 2 threads on different topics Both with the same title

it would also pay you NOT to have 2 threads on different topics Both with the same title

 

lol, gettin lazy in my old age.

 

cheers guys

 

rob

A more interesting question would be: what happens if you make a long jump from the equator' date=' heading north?[/quote']

 

I remember having that as an example question to demonstrate Coriolis forces at university.