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by stetrain 818 days ago
Only because you feel the air rushing past, and the impact with the ground.

If you do this in a capsule where the air is moving with you, and avoid hitting the ground, we call the sensation "weightlessness" or "zero g", like is experienced by astronauts in orbit.

Gravity is absolutely acting on astronauts orbiting the earth, at nearly the same strength as if they were standing on the ground. Depending on the shape of the orbit their linear speed may be increasing or decreasing, and they are definitely experiencing directional acceleration as their path bends in a circle around the Earth. But internally there is no bodily sensation of acceleration. It feels the same as floating, or free fall without the air rushing past.

2 comments

I did sky diving some years back. I did feel acceleration immediately after the jump for a second, but then afterwards it was as if I was lying on bed. So what was that feeling I experienced (it was similar to maintain giant wheel coming down)
Going from standing on a surface where you are resisting the force of gravity (like standing on the ground, or in a stable aircraft) to being in free fall definitely has a sensation.

It's a sensation that actually causes a decent percentage of people to feel physically ill for a period after launching to orbit on a rocket.

It's like going over the top of a hill on a roller coaster where you go from being pulled down into your seat to floating up against the restraints.

But once you're falling, or or in orbit (which is also free fall just outside an atmosphere), you don't feel the changes in velocity (acceleration) due to gravity.

Yes but the feeling of weightlessness is something you can distinguish!
But you don't feel the force of acceleration. Floating weightless and motionless in space feels the same as being in an elliptical orbit around a planet.
Even more, accelerating due to a being in an (idealized) rocket also feels the same.

https://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/equivalence-principle

This has to be true, because if you can't (internally) detect the difference between nothing and a planet being nearby, you obviously also can't detect how massive the planet is, so you can't know if your acceleration relative to the nearby environment is due to gravity or something else, or even how much "absolutel" acceleration you have.

Standing on earth (or the floor of your rocket) feels different due to electromagnetic effects of the nearby "touching" external objects.