It seems like it would depend on the elasticity of the surface you were standing on. Like, if you were standing on a trampoline, then you’d be shot up once gravity turned off. (Equal, opposite, unbalanced force.) But everything’s a trampoline—just a pretty poor one.
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Exactly. Rubber shoe soles will spring back more than wood or metal furniture.
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If you measure how much the thing (eg shoe sole) squishes, you can get a good estimate. Assume it's a perfect spring (probably close, for ordinary stuff at ordinary loads). Spring energy: 1/2*f*d. Kinetic energy: 1/2*m*v^2.
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f=m*g. Substitute, cancel: m*g*d = m*v^2. (d is displacement of squished thing.) Gives v = sqrt(g*d). So if your show squishes by 1mm (reasonable? IDK), 1 gravity gets you about 0.1 m/s of velocity after you turn off gravity.
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And it will take about 0.01s for your shoe to unsquish and accelerate you in this scenario. If it takes an appreciable fraction of that time (or longer) to "turn off" gravity, you won't rise up as quickly.
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Depends on your environment/container and scenario and even type of artificial gravity (and how it “fails”). But in a general sense you can watch people go instantly into “Zero G” on Zero G flight videos (aka vomit comet) which you can ask
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But to go more into the precise physics, I’d hit up physicists
@HakeemOluseyi@AstroKatie@seanmcarroll off the top of my head. -
Great question. I prefer to lead people to answers rather than just give an answer. Assume 2 spheres in contact w/ no forces acting between them, no external forces, no relative motion. They'd stay that way forever, right? Now turn on and off an attractive force. What happens?
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Please understand that if a little knowledge is dangerous then my response should make you shriek with fear. However, unless inertia is turned off as magically as the gravity in this experiment, there would be no immediate effect. Rebuttal?
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Nothing much would happen beyond a vague floaty feeling until something new happened to you. Imagine attaching a piece of metal to an electromagnet in space, then turning the magnet off. They'd stay floating together unless you pushed them apart.
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When you're talking simulated gravity, you mean the Einstein thought experiment about accelerating in a rocket? On which case I think the answer is clear.
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Things wouldn't start to float away by themselves. Something would need to happen to give objects momentum relative to each other.
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I read about this question then other day; it's a fun read:http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160212-what-would-happen-to-you-if-gravity-stopped-working …
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Check the XKCD What If? archives
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Consider a basketball player on Earth, in rest relative to the ground. Suddenly the gravity disappears and he/she decides to jump. How far could they go? Infinite (Newton's First Law of motion). How fast? After the jump, they would be at 5,5m/s (12mi/h), neglecting air friction.
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At what speed would things start to float up? If no external force, they would stay in the same initial condition. In fact, this "controlled environment" happens during every single rocket launch with the difference that astronauts experience higher values of G.
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My game in the App Store called Jiggle Balls can test this for you. You can see what happens when you remove gravity from different bounciness of balls. The ones with no bounce will stay stationary. Those with bounce will release some energy and propel when gravity is reduced.
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The blue ball has no bounce. The white does. It floats when gravity is reduced. The white ball stays put.pic.twitter.com/zLeB7B9q1T
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I mean the blue stays put.
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