What will happen to a person's weight when he is in a moving elevator?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:In an accelerating lift/elevator, weight changes but the mass remains constant.
Theoretically, since
W = mg
where W is the weight of an object on a stationary surface where the acceleration due to earth is g and m is the mass of that object.
In a moving lift, the weight of an object changes because the value of g changes to, say, g'’ because of the acceleration of the elevator. Here the aceleration of the elevator becomes equal to the object placed in it. Since acceleration due to earth g applies everywhere, it interacts with the acceleration of the elevator here and makes a resultant acceleration g'’ (since acceleration is a vector quantity) whose value depends upon the magnitude of g or the acceleration of the elevator.
Therefore, in an accelerating elevator/lift, the new weight of the object is—
W'’ = m*g'’
and not W = m*g
P.S.— Even when the acceleration of the elevator is zero, the weight of the object changes (obviously the mass remains unchanged) because the initial velocity of the elevator was zero and some sort of acceleration was required to set the elevator in constant motion.