"When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down"

See subject claim.

Where are the forces and how are they described in differing gravitational reference frames when all of us mere mortals do push-ups?

I believe this is a variation of the all-the-Chinese-on-Earth-jump-at-once question and answer, handled by Cecil, among others. I, for one, wouldn’t mind hearing it again as put in this personal one-man setup.

I took the statement from one of many Chuck Norris lists.

Are you a time traveler from 2005?

Physics don’t apply to Chuck Norris.

Yes they do. There is a long bureaucratic application process to be endured when you seek Chuck Norris’s approval and physics isn’t exempt from it.

Chuck Norris invented the laws of physics just so he could break them.

Chuck Norris doesn’t do pushups. He does earth downs.

You know how many of those earth downs he can do?

All of them.

Actually, he bonds his palms to the Earth and pulls it up. It only looks like he’s pushing it down.

There are more Chuck Norris facts than there are subatomic particles in the universe.
And he’s recited them all by memory.

Yes, you’re all very clever.

When you have a system of an Earth-Human, and the human does a pushup, he (or she, as the case may be) has to exert some amount of force to accelerate themselves away from the Earth. By Newton’s Third Law of Motion (Every action has an equal and opposite reaction), the same amount of force is applied to the earth. However, by Newton’s Second Law of Motion (Force equals mass times acceleration), you can see that the acceleration required to make Mr. Norris and his 100 kilograms of mass start moving is going to have an extremely small effect on the Early and its 6x10^24 kilograms.

So yes, when Chuck Norris does a push up, he’s pushing the Earth away. The Earth is also being pushed away when you do a push up. It’s just moving away by something on the order of 10^-22 meters. Which is much less than the width of an atom, if I remember my “size of an election cloud” lecture from high school physics.

I remember someone talking about an episode of Super Friends where Superman moved the Earth for some reason. They commented about how to the people on earth it would just look like Supes was doing a handstand.

“Gee Superman, not one of your most impressive stunts.”

“I’M MOVING THE EARTH YOU ASS!”

“Yeah, OK. Whatever you say.”

I was going to ask who Chuck Norris is, but I decided that I didn’t really need to know.

With reference to the above; if an equivalent Australian does the same thing at the same time, the forces will be cancelled out.

It’s not really relevant to the question, no. But Mr. Norris is an American Martial artist turned action film/TV star, who was the subject of a set of memes about all the “amazing” things he can do in the early 2000s.

Well, if Australia and the US were antipodes, yes. They are slightly offset but the concept is right.

Except for the notion of canceling Chuck Norris.

It’s actually worse than that: Chuck Norris has counted to infinity. Twice.

He’s also quite short, to the extent that Walker: Texas Ranger casting went out of its way to hire even shorter actors so that he could look tall.

And his acting career got started by Bruce Lee who was also short and looked for short actors in his films.

5’10" is “quite short”?

Yes. :slight_smile:

Apparently sources differ on his height, with 5’10" being the “official” height, but the “actual” height being a few inches shorter.

So are these Chuck Norris jokes a rip off of The Most Interesting Man in The World? Or is it the other way around?

This would all be true, until Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks Isaac Newton (gently, we need him alive) until Norris gets a blanket exception to all of Newton’s laws.

True story, bro.

I bought that comic book when I was a kid. There was an issue–I’m guessing it was in 1965 ± 2 years–where he was supposed to do some number of amazing feats, I can’t remember why, and one of them was moving the earth just as you described.