• Question: Is gravity stronger than the strongest man in the world?

    Asked by teedleweed to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 18 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 18 Jun 2015:


      @teedleweed actually gravity is very weak. It is only because the world is so massive that it has enough force to hold us down. The gravitational attraction of a “strong man” is given by F = GMm/r^2 so if you are standing next to this strong man and I’m guessing you are about 40kg and the strong man is about 140 kg and you are one metre apart then his gravitational pull on you (where G is the gravitational constant = 6.67384 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2 )

      F = (6.67384 × 10^-11 x 40 x 140)/(1×1) = 3.7 x 10^-7 N

      = 0.00000037 N so not much at all!

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 18 Jun 2015:


      No, I think you’re definitely stronger than gravity!

      Whenever you pick up an object – whatever the object is – you’re counter-acting gravity. Gravity wants to pull things down, so whenever you lift something up, you prove that you’re stronger!

      Of course, eventually your arm will get tired and you’ll drop the object again, but that’s just because gravity never tires. You’re still stronger than it though!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 19 Jun 2015:


      Gravity is pretty weak, as the others have pointed out, but I’m going to take a different angle on this one. For small objects, the strongest man can certainly counteract gravity for a short time, but in order to overcome gravity entirely, the strong man would have to be able to throw the object out of the gravitational well entirely! If he’s standing on the surface of the earth (as most humans are), then to get any object out of the Earth’s orbit, he’d need to fling it at a speed over 40,000 km/h. A strong man can not throw that fast – this is why we have rockets to do this work for us! Gravity is one of the weakest forces out there, but it’s powerful once you get a lot of matte together!

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