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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.