Blog 3: Defying Newton's Laws

Today my mom asked me to burn her a CD of all the pictures I took on our trip this past summer. While I was doing this, I came across this picture I took of a man I saw on a street in Barcelona who was floating in mid air! At the time I was flabbergasted and wondered how it was physcially possible.  However, I have learned a lot since then and when I saw this today I thought, "Physics must have an answer!" I turned to Newton and his trusty laws to explain it.

Newton's first law of motion states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion continues moving at a constant velocity unless acted upon by a net external force.  If this is true, the man should accelerate downards because the force of gravity is  acting on him.  However, he just floated there, motionless. 

Newton's second law states that Accleration = Net Force / Mass.  Because the acceleration of the man is zero, that must mean that the net force also is equal to zero. In order for net force to be zero,  there must be another force acting on the man that is equal in magnitude but opposite in direction of gravity to make Fnet = 0. So I guess he is pushing up on his stick with a force of 9.8 N?  But it still seems impossible. Maybe gravity just doesn't affect him. I wish Newton was here to see this...