world help: If you could drill a big hole through the exact center of the world and jump down it would you float in the middle? - Help.com

lol you’d probably burn up.

Yes you would float at the exact middle and if you were not at the exact middle you would float towards it. Of course, in reality the heat and pressure would kill you long before you even got close :)

Why would you float ? Why wouldn’t you fall through the other side ? lol

yep you’d float because the earth is spinning and you would be at it’s center of gravity.

Ahhhh.. ok

Watch Journey to the center of the earth. That movie is scientific fact. It explains everything

=)

Not to get to geeky (I can’t help myself :)) but the reason you would float, assuming the core was hollow, is because an equal amount of mass and therefore equal amount of gravity would be pulling you in all directions.

The Earth’s rotation actually does not create the gravity, although if the Earth was completely hollow and you were standing on the interior surface of the crust you would feel something similar to gravity, it would actually be the centrifugal force :)

No, you wouldn’t float in the centre. You would fall to one side of the hole. Unless you were put there exactly with no momentum whatsoever, the gravity of the sides of the earth you pull you to them. I am assuming gravitational centre of the earth. The centre based on it in general would not be the gravitational centre.

So they say. Or you would fall back and forth forever.

Bogdan wrote:
No, you wouldn’t float in the centre. You would fall to one side of the hole. Unless you were put there exactly with no momentum whatsoever, the gravity of the sides of the earth you pull you to them. I am assuming gravitational centre of the earth. The centre based on it in general would not be the gravitational centre.

you’d probably be drawn toward the gravitational center. he’s right about the physical center not being the gravitational one, and it’d be pretty hard to exact that. (though it’d be pretty hard to drill a hole down there anyway)

Although it is true the geometrical center of the Earth would not be exactly the same as the gravitational center do the mass shifting around in the core and mantle, for all intents and purposes they would be about the same.

The reason is that gravity is the weakest of the four forces. To be felt at all it requires an enormous amount of mass. The minor shifting of mass (even though by minor we are talking larges amounts compared to our human bodies) within the Earth would not be enough to sway you at the center.

Consider that the tectonic plates on the opposite side of the planet from where you sit now are moving, yet you are feeling virtually no gravitational shift from their movement :)

When you hold a cup up, you are beating gravity. Well, achieving a stalemate with it, since you cannot throw the cup to escape velocity. But the entire mass of the Earth cannot pull a cup out of your hand. That is how weak gravity is.

Sort of, you would bob back and forth, up and down in the core due to gravity pullling.

I thought you’d slam into the side of the hole… I read that somewhere…

You’d only slam into the side of the hole if you didn’t enter the hole at a vertical angle or if the hole did not go straight through the planet. A hole coinciding with the diameter of the planet and intersecting the center would result in you falling straight down, experiencing stronger gravitation pull from the bottom but more or less equal pull from the sides, until you were at the center, at which point the pull would be more or less equal from all directions.

While yes you would “wobble”, as I explained earlier gravity is relatively weak, and the wobble would not be like someone shaking all around, but would most likely not be detectable by your senses. However you could voluntarily move around similar to how an astronaut behaves in space. But you would constantly drift back towards the center.

You would fall so fast that you would get past the center and start to go up again.