Just as a thought experiment, what would happen if you broke away from gravity so that you stayed in one place but the earth revolved underneath you? (Ignoring buildings and other obstacles. Say you stayed a foot above whatever the local ground or water surface was.)
Would you circumnavigate the earth in a great circle route that took you across the same ground over or over? Or would you move like a satellite so that you eventually covered the entire earth? Or would you just stay at whatever parallel of longitude you started with? Or something else entirely?
I assume that no matter what you would return to your starting point in one day and see the sun rise and set normally. Correct?
It seems to me that you would stay at the same latitude as your starting point as lines of latitude run perpendicular to the axis of rotation. So you wouldn’t describe a great circle (unless you were at the equator), and you wouldn’t have anything like the orbit of a satalite as a satalites track over the earth is a result of the earth’s rotation and the plane and speed of the orbit.
You would end up in the same place in a day but you wouldn’t see the sun rise and set as you would be following the sun. The sun should appear relatively stationary
once you started on your journey, ther would be no “day” and you wouldn’t see the sun set like normal at all.
I assume that since the earth is spinning under you that you are staying put relative to the sun.so the only change in the sun that you would see is the gradual rocking of the sun due to the wobble of the earth.
it seems tat that “wobble” would cause you to cover a path that , as a “circle” would rotate on its axis some (I dont have the number) few degrees and then swing back 6 months later. you would only cover the exact same path every year.
Just a minute there! At the time gravity is turned off you have a certain tangential velocity. In the absence of drag from the atmosphere you will retain that velocity. So you will go shooting off into space on a line tangent to the surface at the point your were when gravity was stopped and in the direction of your tangential velocity at that time.
The only reason you don’t do that now is that gravity accelerates you toward the center of the earth at the same rate that a stone on the surface of the earth is accelerated in that direction.
That is true but I didn’t think that was the intention of the OP which states that you hover a foot above the earth ignoring all obstacles and that the earth rotates underneath you. It doesn’t say “What happens if someone turns off the gravity?”.
the earth is moving around the sun at a certain velocity and certain centripital acceleration. If you werent stuck to the earth, you would not accelerate and you would gradually move further away from the sun while the earth rotates.
Part of the problem with this is that there is (and can be) no absolute reference frame, but assuming that the OP means that one would simply maintain a position that cancels out only the rotation of the earth, then I reckon these things would happen:
The ground would be moving beneath you, whether this was very fast or slow would depend on your latitude (fast at the equator, relatively slow at the poles)
Your path would describe a kind of sinusoidal spiral around the Earth as it orbits the sun; you wouldn’t cover all of the surface but you would cover pretty much every point in a band equivalent to that between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
You would see the sun rise and set, but once a year (you are maintaining a fixed angular position with respect to the Earth’s centre, not the sun).
IANAAstroPhysicist though, so maybe I’ve missed something.
Why would you stop accelerating? Actually, you don’t accelerate, you fall. I think if there were any change in trajectory you would get closer to the sun, due to your weak centripidal force.
We need to hear from someone who sounds WAY more official on this.
