But...
This is usenet.
Things always fly off at tangents.
I knew they'd come for you eventually.
Bill
I knew the Earth Rotation Service had a real purpose:
Speaking of flying, we are being visited regularly by a sparrow lacking tail feathers. We call her "no-tail", for some reason. She comes looking for food every day, sometimes more than once. Two questions come to mind: How did she lose her tail feathers? The others ganged up on her perhaps. What is the effect on her flying ability?
No! As has already been pointed out, we'd fly off, tangentially. Except for people living at the poles.
Speaking of poles ...
But if you take into account that the earth itself is largely held together by gravity, wouldn't it also start to tangentialise itself? Therefore the effect as perceived by an individual might be more like floating off? I am having a hard job trying to think through how everything would happen and suspect it depends to some extent on whether gravity crashed absolutely instantaneously or if it slowly faded.
Are they perhaps nesting in your part of the world?
Feather moulting normally takes place after nesting but *feather mites* can infest the nest and accelerate the process.
Switch of gravity and every thing, down to below the atomic level, keeps going in the direction and velocity it was at the instant of switch off.
Now as everything is vibrating, because everything is hot (relative to absolute zero), everything will just fly apart in random directions, no doubt there will also be a lot of collisions...
Fairly usre it's one of the nuclear forces that keeps the electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus. So molecules or atoms probably won't fall apart and thinking about it gravity is a stupidly weak force. The entire mass of the earth can only generate a few hundred newtons on my body. So a continuing tangential explosion of lumps is likely to happen.
Oh yes - I was allowing atoms to stay together - nuclear and electrical forces. But surely, initially, everything will continue on its own tangent so me and "thing next to me" will have similar, but not quite identical, tangents to follow. So we will feel as if we are slowly drifting apart.
Things at the macro level, like people, aren't held together by gravity so they won't fly apart.
the earth's crust would probably split at fault lines and fly of in large chunks taking the buildings and stuff with it. It may break up into smaller chunks than the continental plates as the stuff at the equator is actually travelling at about 1000mph while that at the poles is doing 0 mph.
It would be interesting to see if the electrostatic charges caused by the splitting apart would be enough to pull large quantities of stuff back together to form a "comet" or two.
Of course if gravity went there would be a lot of novae as all the stars and blackholes explode.
No, we are in the middle of summer, the nestlings are now out of the nest. This is the only sparrow of the local flock of 30 or so without tail-feathers.
Anyway, I was only being tangential ;)
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