So if you time it perfectly, the elevator would hit the floor but since you were in the air, you don’t feel the pressure of the landing. And then you wouldn’t get injured, right?
In: Physics
Depends on how fast your falling, if your falling really fast, it’s not gonna matter because you are going to slam into the ceiling and then the floor, maybe with less force
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Maybe think of it like that if you where to jump out of a flying plane and while you’re falling someone would construct an elevator around you, do you think that would in any way change the fact that you’re falling and thus building up some pretty high velocity that is suddenly changed to 0 once you hit the ground?
I was literally just thinking about this an hour or two ago. You have to lie down on the floor.
You would still be traveling as fast as the elevator, you would just hit a split second later.
No, you would just hit the floor a split second later with *maybe* slightly less force than you would have had you not jumped. You get hurt by a sudden stop, it doesn’t matter if that sudden stop was from the elevator itself suddenly stopping (not jumping) or you hitting an elevator that has already stopped (what happens if you jump)
It would be virtually the same.
You would have to jump with a force that would accelerate you upwards to the same velocity as the elevator…..which is impossible. The g-force would then probably turn you to jam instead of the impact. Its all about conservation of energy really.
If you jump up in a fallen elevator you are not moving upward relative to the ground. You will just be moving down slightly slower.
A simple way to compare how you can jump versus the acceleration that gravity provides is to stretch your hand up and touch a point as high as you can on the wall or on something else. Then jump up from standing still and see how much higher you can reach with your hand. I think for most people it will be less than half a meter.
That is the height you can jump, you can jump on to or over higher stuff but a large part is just that you bend your legs up.
What limits the height you can jump from is gravity. So you jumping in an elevator world compensate for a fall from the height you can jump. So we talk about reducing the elevator drop by 0.5 meters.
I suspect the best to do if you were in a falling elevator is to manage to lay down on your back flat on the floors so you can spread out the force on as large an area as possible. So jumping is a bad idea,
Elevators do not fall that way you see in movies. There are systems that automatically brake if a cable snaps. It was in fact the invitation of the safety elevator the stop if the wire break that startedd the usage in buildings. Elisha Otis demonstrates the invention in 1854 and it as the start of the modern elevator business.
You can look at the design here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSjJjKcoNRk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSjJjKcoNRk)
Mythbusters tested this in one of their early episodes. The crash test dummy they used got absolutely destroyed I seem to remember. I’m sure you can find the episode somewhere online
Edit: it’s ep 17
Imagine driving 50mph into a brick wall with your feet on the dash, and push back at the last minute. You already have too much momentum going forward, and the vehicle you are in will be crushed anyway.
If the elevator started falling from any more than a single story high, no. The speed the elevator is falling is far too high to overcome with your jump. For example, if you would normally hit at 40 MPH and countered with a 3 MPH jump, you’re still smacking into the ground at 37 MPH which will not end well for you.
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