Part of me likes to thing something crazy would happen if you turned it from the other end. Turn one gear once and the gear at the far other end turns a googol times but melts somewhere around a trillion rotations. Almost doesn't feel too outlandish given a scope that already includes "more energy than the entire known universe has" (per the article) for a measurement.
With each gear reducing your force 100 times, there would be a point when moving the next gear becomes impossible without destroying the machine.
So you either spin the fast gear an impossible number of times, or spin the slow gear with impossible force.
I ran the numbers for going in the other direction. Suppose that: * The 99 slower gears are massless. * the fastest gear weighs 10 grams * The fastest gear is a cylinder of radius of 2cm * The slowest gear completes 1 rotation every 3 days. * Relativity only applies when I want it to. We have: * The fastest gear has an angular velocity of: w=10^95 radians/second = 10^95 s^-1 //Since radians are unitless * The fastest…
>Giving us a black hole large enough to fit about 112 googol observable universes. *Giving us a black hole with a radius large enough to fit about 112 googol observable universes stacked end-to-end in a line. ~Triple the number of zeros for the number of universes to fit in its 3D volume. 112 x (4/3) x pi followed by 336 zeroes, more or less.
Doing some more order of magnitude approximations, in order to scale this black hole down so it were the size of our observable universe, define "the diameter of the universe in millimeters" (approx 10^30) as mmU. There are mmU * mmU * mmU * 0.5 mmU universes in the diameter of this black hole. For each millimeter in this scaled-down black hole, there are mmU groups of mmU universes, with another half layer of nesting, but then you can divide that by 1000. To fit the number of universes in the whole volume in a line end to end, repeat this process again, except without the extra half layer and division by 1000.
Are there any science museums that have something like this? When you look at this, you think that surely you can make that last gear spin. After all we've all spun gears, we know how they work. But it would be so counter intuitive to spin one of those gears by hand and basically see nothing happen no matter how much you spin it. I know that would blow the minds of some kids (and adults).
Sciencenter in Ithaca has one of these. The last gear is attached to a small platform with wine glass that you’re encouraged to try to break.
What happens to the energy used to rotate the device? Is it dissipated as heat before it reaches too far?
Friction basically. In a perfectly idealised version of the system with no friction/slack/materials being deformed/etc, if you started it off then let go then everything would keep spinning forever. You don't need to pump a whole lot of energy into the device to make it go.
"...if you started..."
That's a big if. I haven't done the math yet, but I'll bet that the outside rim of at least one of the gears would have to be started moving faster than the speed of light. I'm not sure how you would do that.
The gear just before the first gear at light speed would have the outside rim moving at about 100th of the speed of light. It would take quite a bit of energy to do that.
(Others have pointed out that at speeds well before the speed of light, some of the gears would melt. I'm ignoring that.)