Undergrad Is it physically possible to climb up a building like this?

[CamSpell]

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In this 19 sec. video, a guy climbs up a building by jumping against two opposing walls. I don't see how that could be possible. Some shoe-soles materials stick very well on smooth-shiny surfaces, true!, and the guy's mass has a side-to-side motion and less time to fall down... But I still can't believe it's possible.

I haven't done the calculations, I don't know how to do that, and we don't even know what the actual friction force is. But judging by how it looks I would say more force / speed should be required to defy gravity. It's just an uneducated approximation.

What do you think?

 

[256bits]

I think it is possible.
some people can do some amazing things.
This is one of them I believe.

 

[A.T.]

It should require more force, and more speed.

Have you calculated it?

 

[PeroK]

What do you think?

When you see what others can do:

 

[CamSpell]

Have you calculated it?

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Nope!, I wouldn't know how to calculate it. If I knew how to do that I wouldn't have asked. It's just an opinion of mine, an approximation judging by how it looks. I'll rephrase that in the original message.

 

[willem2]

While you are doing this, the wall should provide an average upwards friction force of mg. This needs an average normal force of
\frac {m g } { \mu}
The average horizontal acceleration is \frac { 2 v } { T } = \frac { g } { \mu}
(the average of the absolute value of course, and you accelerate from -v to +v and back.)
This gives a required speed of:
\frac {g T} {2 \mu }
I get T = 0.9 from the video (8 jumps in 7 seconds). The static friction coefficient is probably at least one, but might be as high as 2 (found rubber on glass)
with μ=1 you get v = 4.4 m/s. That's the maximum speed. It's hard to get the speed from the video, since all body parts will move at different speeds, and the jumper is in contact with one of the walls and accelerating most of the time.
Since the walls are only about 2m apart, and the the time taken is 0.9 s for each jump, v = 4.4 m/s seems too high for the maximum speed, so I think a μ significantly bigger than one is needed. With μ=2 the maximum speed only has to be 2.2 m/s, which seems very possible.
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