the earth rotates, but when you are in the air, you rotate with the earth, how does this work?
In: Physics
You don’t rotate with the Earth when you are off the ground, lets forget about air for a moment. When you jump the tangential velocity you had from the Earth’s rotational is conserved and so you start moving in a straight line. However, the Earth is huge and so that for that little time you spend in the air the Earth rotates a very small angel. So basically the difference in velocity between the point you jumped from and your velocity is practically 0.
Of course if you want to measure this effect you need to get clever and introduce some oscillation where this difference can add up. That’s sorta how a Foucault pendulum works.
If we include air so basically why isn’t a hot air balloon effected at all is because the air it’s suspended in does rotate with the planet. Why? Well imagine if it didn’t that would introduce friction between the ground and the surface, I think a huge space rock has more inertia than the thin atmosphere so the bottom layer would speed up to match the rotation and because the air has viscosity this will continue upwards until the atmosphere mostly uniformly rotates with the Earth. So of course a hot air balloon won’t be effected. Basically everything that uses the air to suspend itself.
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