Is it true that if you jump on an airplane you'll die?

Take THAT Norman Einstein!

Joe

The result would actually be much the same as simply standing in the aisle during take-off.

Specifically: your body will experience length contraction along the direction of motion. This relative “flattening” will cause the body to behave like a parachute, resisting the acceleration, and preventing any absurd “death by internal plane impact” scenarios.

Nice try

Please note the lack of such, and the presence of a perfectly sane suggestion that I might land a few seats back from where I jumped. Just sayin’. :wink:

Meanwhile, the whole “behave like a parachute” thing is bringing up some bugs bunny images. Have I been whooshed?

Well, you can trust me because I’m a Professor of Einsteinian Physics and Quantumetry. And a Nutritionist.

And it’s interesting that you mention bugs bunny.
I sometimes begin my lectures with bugs bunny cartoons, to give my students a solid intuition of certain relativistic effects, before we get down to the mathematics.

Treadmills do make things more complicated, of course.

Imagine you have one of those treadmills where you can adjust the slope of your steps. If you constantly adjust the angle so you are parallel to the horizon, when the plane is pulling up you can jump and hit the back ceiling and “ride” it gently to the back wall.

If you go fast enough (or if the plane is going slow enough) where you can match the plane’s forward velocity, then when you jump you will stay in the same spot relative to the plane! :slight_smile:

If you turn the treadmill to face backward though, you hit the rear that much faster. That’s where the Bugs Bunny physics comes in and you get the imprint of a body in the wall and they need a spatula before people board for the next flight.

Orbital mechanics is funky. Throwing the wrench sideways will put it on an orbit that moves slightly away from the ISS, then as you come back around the Earth, the wrench will come back and smack the ISS in the side. Unless there is some other disturbance along the way. Like, say, a thruster burn.

Drag will play a role in changing the orbit of each item, and differences in drag may give them different altitudes at the time the paths cross again, but I wouldn’t want to count on that - and neither do the astronauts. 90 minutes isn’t much time to have a big effect.

Interestingly, if you throw the wrench forward, it will end up under you; throw the wrench backwards, it will end up above you. Throw it down, it will end up behind you, throw it up it will end up in front of you. (IIRC - I could very will have that backwards. Don’t rely on me to get your spaceship home.)

:smiley: (Inside the plane is different than jumping out of the plane. For that, you need a Z axis.)

At the risk of actually answering a question, are you jumping in a commercial airliner, or an F-18 using afterburners launching off a carrier? The “ginormous” thrust of commercial airliners is that pull you feel into the seat of the plane on take off. You will, at most, end up a couple feet behind your take off point. More like maybe six inches, depending on how high you jump.

The facts:
The speed of rotation at the equator is approx 1000 mph.
Newton’s third law: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Therefore:
Standing on the equator and throwing a monkey wrench directly in the direction the Earth is spinning will cause the Earth to stop. DO NOT DO IT.

Alternately:
Throwing the wrench backwards will cause the Earth to spin twice as fast. Also probably a bad idea. DO NOT DO IT.

If you throw the wrench across the international dateline, it will travel in time. This effect is exploited for the disposal of waste (by sending it one day into the past). Items thrown in the other direction travel one day in the future, however, this is only used in the manufacture of alarm clocks.

If you throw a wrench in the works, but everybody is on break when you do it, does it still gum things up?

I want to take an adult-sized sit-and-spin thing to the South Pole. I would center it on the exact geographic pole and spin counterclockwise. Each revolution would take me one day farther into the past, right?

I think it depends on how fast you spin. If you spin at the same speed as the Earth (but in the opposite direction) then you’ll stop moving in time. For each minute you spend doing that, the Earth will move forward one minute, so you’ll effectively go back one minute. Spin at the exact speed of the Earth for one day and you’ll be one day behind. Do it for a year, and you’ll be a year behind, etc.

If you counter-spin faster than the the Earth is spinning then it gets more complicated and you’ll need someone who knows linear equations (circular equations, maybe?) to figure that out.

Of course if you spin in the same direction as the Earth than it stands to reason that the opposite will happen and you’ll go into the future.

In theory, yes, but in practice, you can’t sit there because it’s where the bearings that attach Earth to the Solar System are mounted.

What kind of crazy talk is this?

It uses frictionless magnetic bearings and they are well off the surface.

Well, obviously, but the magnetism will pull the iron out of your blood (well, it would, if you could stop there, but you can’t because it’s frictionless)

Did you ever have an MRI? Did it pull the iron out of your blood? :rolleyes:

Well, yes actually. But fortunately I had a lot of pennies in my pocket so I was able to replace the iron with copper which wasn’t affected by the electromagnets.

It was interesting running on a cupric oxide based system for a few weeks until everything reset.

The pointed ears must have drawn some stares.

MRIs are a hoax. The reason they cram you in such a confined space for the ‘scan’ is so that you can’t properly observe the trickery. It’s just a black and white image of sliced ham.

Nu uhh… I saw them doing it on House an there weren’t no sliced ham. :cool:

Oncet, I ran up the aisle of a plane while flying from the US to Europe, and broke the long distance running record. Then I ran back down the aisle, and they took the record away from me. But I fooled 'em! I ran back up the aisle! Twice!