What If You Fell Through the Center of the Earth?

If you jumped into a tunnel straight through the Earth, you'd pop out the other side in about 42 minutes. And it doesn't matter where you dig. Here's why, from the deepest hole ever drilled to the trick Isaac Newton figured out 300 years ago. Chapters 0:00 Falling through the Earth 0:46 The deepest hole ever dug 1:54 What's inside the Earth 2:57 Building the impossible tunnel 3:36 Newton's shell trick 4:29 The fall 5:36 The other side 6:25 The spin problem (and where you'd pop out) 7:21 Gravity trains 8:38 The satellite secret 9:26 The real Earth 10:29 The answer Sources and notes • Kola Superdeep Borehole: drilling began in 1970 and reached 12,262 m in 1989. Rock at the bottom was ~180 °C. • Earth's structure: crust 5–70 km; mantle ~2,900 km; liquid outer core; solid inner core of radius ~1,220 km. Center ≈ 5,200 °C, pressure ≈ 360 GPa (~3.6 million atmospheres). • Newton's shell theorem (Principia, 1687). • Gravity tunnel, uniform-density model: one way ≈ 42 min, round trip ≈ 84 min, top speed ≈ 7.9 km/s. The same time applies to any straight tunnel. • Cooper, P. W. (1966). "Through the Earth in Forty Minutes." American Journal of Physics 34, 68. • Realistic density: gravity peaks (~10.7 m/s²) at the core–mantle boundary; the trip takes ≈ 38 min 11 s. Klotz, A. R. (2015). "The gravity tunnel in a non-uniform Earth." American Journal of Physics 83, 231. • ISS: ~400 km altitude, ~92-minute orbit. Equator rotation speed ≈ 1,670 km/h. Tori is an animated character. His voice is AI-generated, and the script was written and fact-checked for this channel. Next episode: what if every insect on Earth disappeared? #science #physics #space #whatif