You would have an elevator with a wet floor. Careful not to slip.
Elevators don’t descend anywhere near fast enough to counteract the force of gravity. Moving that fast would be dangerous to the unrestrained human occupants. If you aren’t experiencing weightlessness or hitting the roof in an elevator water wouldn’t either, these things are both the same in terms of the physics involved.
If the elevator were supported or falling through air (which would slow down the elevator), it would still hit the ground.
If it was in free fall and there was no air to slow it down, the water would neither hit the ceiling or the wall it would float. [Exactly like this.](https://youtu.be/o8TssbmY-GM?t=101)
The International Space Station is constantly falling. It’s just moving so quickly to the side that it keeps missing the earth. This is called an orbit.
The only way it hits the ceiling is if something like a rocket is pushing it downwards faster than gravity.
Several problems
Elevators fall upward. If everything were to fail it would go up because the counterbalance weighs more than the car up to the max weight.
Elevators have brakes
If they move past the speed the motor can handle, the brakes engage
Elevators are on a track that has friction greater than 0. Even if all the aforementioned things failed and the cable somehow was severed, the elevator wouldn’t be able to reach freefall speed, so the water would always be able to hit the bottom of the car.
This thread has a lot of overcomplicated answers that make a bunch of assumptions.
If you are in a free falling elevator and you disregard friction, you are accelerating at 9.8m/s^2, which is gravitational acceleration (1g). The water in this case would float in mid air as though you’re in space. This is the same principle as zero-g airplane flights, which enter a free fall to simulate a zero-g environment for a short period.
The reason this happens is because when you’re holding your bottle of water in the free falling elevator, it’s already accelerating downward at 1g. Pouring it out doesn’t make it fall any faster. It will continue accellerating at 1g, but it will be outside the bottle. If the elevator comes to a stop, the water will fall to the floor.
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