Wednesday, September 20, 2017

newtonian mechanics - Why doesn't the Earth accelerate towards us?


According to Newton's third law of motion that states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.


So, if the Earth exerts a gravitational pull on us (people) then even we should exert a force equal and opposite (in terms of direction) on the Earth.


It is intuitive to think that this force is really small to get the Earth to move. But, if we take a look at the second law of motion that states that F = ma we see that however small the force, there will be some amount of acceleration. Therefore, even though we exert a very small gravitational force on the Earth it should be enough to get the Earth to move even though the acceleration is a very small amount.


But what I said clearly does not happen. So there must be some flaw with my reasoning. What is that flaw?



Answer




The acceleration that your gravitational pull causes in the Earth is tiny, tiny, tiny because the Earth's mass is enormous. If your mass is, say, $70\;\mathrm{kg}$, then you cause an acceleration of $a\approx 1.1\times 10^{-22}\;\mathrm{m/s^2}$.


A tiny, tiny, tiny acceleration does not necessarily mean a tiny, tiny, tiny speed, since, as you mention in comments, the velocity accumulates. True. It doesn't necessarily mean that - but in this case it does. The speed gained after 1 year at this acceleration is only $v\approx 3.6×10^{-15}\;\mathrm{m/s}$. And after a lifetime of 100 years it is still only around $v\approx 3.6×10^{-13}\;\mathrm{m/s}$.


If all 7.6 billion people on the planet suddenly lifted off of Earth and stayed hanging in the air on the same side of the planet for 100 years, the planet would reach no more than $v\approx 2.8\times 10^{-3}\;\mathrm{m/s}$; that is around 3 millimeters-per-second in this obscure scenario of 100 years and billions of people's masses.




Now, with all that being said, note that I had to assume that all those people are not just standing on the ground - they must be levitating above the ground.


Because, while levitating (i.e. during free-fall), they only exert the gravitational force $F_g$:


$$\sum F=ma\quad\Leftrightarrow\quad F_g=ma$$


and there is a net acceleration. But when standing on the ground, they also exert a downwards pushing force equal to their weight $w$:


$$\sum F=ma\quad\Leftrightarrow\quad F_g-w=ma$$


Now there are two forces on the Earth, pushing in opposite directions. And in fact, the weight exactly equals the gravitational force (because those two are the action-reaction pair from Newton's 3rd law), so the pressing force on Earth cancels out the gravitational pull. Then above formula gives zero acceleration. The forces cancel out and nothing accelerates any further.



In general, any system can never accelerate purely by it's own internal forces. If we consider the Earth-and-people as one system, then their gravitational forces on each other are internal. Each part of the system may move individually - the Earth can move towards the people and the free-falling people can move towards the Earth. But the system as a whole - defined by the centre-of-mass of the system - will not move anywhere.


So, the Earth can move a tiny, tiny, tiny bit towards you while you move a much larger distance towards the Earth during your free-fall so the combined centre-of-mass is still stationary. But when standing on the ground, nothing can move because that would require you to break through the ground and move inwards into the Earth. If the Earth was moving but you weren't, then the centre of mass would be moving (accelerating) and that is simply impossible. The system would be gaining kinetic energy without any external energy input; creating free energy out of thin air is just not possible. So this never happens.


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