If you were falling from a high place standing on top of a stack of chairs and as you were approaching the ground you would produce a downwards force onto to stack, making the lowest chair fall down and you continued doing this, could that slow down your speed enough for you to survive?

615 views

Edit: Obviously assuming you can actually control the stack well enough to make just one chair fall each time so you don’t lose the entire stack, this is not a question about practicality just about a theoretical situation

In: Physics

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

No. That’s not how the newton’s cradle works. If you managed this, and it would be damn difficult, you would fly off the top as the bottom chair flies off the bottom. Now you’re landing ever so slightly more gently against a stack of mangled chairs.

Assuming in a hypothetical that you somehow sat at the bottom of the stack and could perfectly convert all of your body’s energy to kinetic energy and fire the chairs out the bottom, we can instead apply the rocket equation to see if you’d stop in time.

While I can’t possibly be bothered to do the math, no human amount of strength can do this.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Technically yes, assuming you had enough mass in chairs or enough shoving force. In essence, you are just describing a *really weird* rocket propulsion system.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Like your five? It’s possible but not practical.

You would need a decouple force that exerts force upwards and something like airbags or explosives could make the force but not the duration to slow you down.

The longer you fall the more acceleration you gain due to gravity force making it harder to slow down due to inertia. Also if you slow down too fast you will not survive.