6 ms·
The original mentioned, Arthur Ganson's Machine with Concrete, is quite a bit more artistic. The end is cast in concrete. The idea is that there is a certain a
by Benjammer 7y ago
The original mentioned, Arthur Ganson's Machine with Concrete, is quite a bit more artistic. The end is cast in concrete.
The idea is that there is a certain amount of energy lost as friction in each gear, per turn. If you calculate the gear ratios and how many turns of the earlier gears would be required to make the final gear move, even infinitesimally, the amount of energy lost becomes more than all the energy in the known universe. It's not really about RPMs.
- noncoml 7y agoImpressive but imho he could take it one step further and instead of concrete on the other end, he could rotate the gear in the opposite way.
- jagged-chisel 7y agoWhen all the slack has been rotated out, it would require a tremendous amount of force to rotate that last gear in reverse. After all, the system wants to amplify the gear speed from that end.
- NegativeLatency 7y agoI think parent’s idea would work if the system was mirrored and duplicated. Then you could attach the two the them together with the stationary gears in the middle
- rtkwe 7y agoSo 10^100:1:10^100? I think the slack, friction losses, flex, material strength would all take out so much of the energy you'd get a tiny fraction of movement at the far end if any.
- Benjammer 7y agoWow I like this idea, instead of concrete you really emphasize the point with another motor the opposite direction and the other end.
- noncoml 7y agoYes, thanks for clarifying it :)
- numpad0 7y agoActually not mirrored, just duplicated and joined at the concrete face. Mirrored would rotate in the same direction. Then it’ll “create two universe worth of energy” at the center of it.
- amelius 7y agoYeah, but if you'd actually run the machine long enough it would simply destroy itself due to the force multiplier.
- 6nf 7y agoSure but the point is that ‘long enough’ in this case is so long that we would never actually see it happen.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Benjammer 7y agoIt would take more energy than the total energy of the known universe to turn the last gear.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- numpad0 7y ago*the gear in the middle
- Benjammer 7y agoSure, if you are inverting the gear ratios half way through...
- hnuser123456 7y agoEven without that, even 50 of these gears would take the mass-energy of something between a star system and a galaxy cluster to turn at any human-scale timeframe
- kube-system 7y agoNah, I'm sure it would take less than 100lb-ft to rotate it, but it'll have fewer teeth when you're done.
- PascLeRasc 7y agoSomeone somewhere is working on an ICO based on this.
- rriepe 7y agoThe concrete felt too on-the-nose to me. The OP's gears are better laid out to illustrate the concept, and they let you think about what happens with the last gear instead of demonstrating it so... concretely.
- mechhacker 7y agoIt's also the elastic modulus of the gears. Every solid thing has some stiffness or measure of how much it compresses/stretches when it's loaded. There will be finite (but extremely small) compressive/tensile forces that are absorbed in the stretch of the material that the gears and driveline are made out of. Like stretching a rubber band to double its length takes a force you can feel but stretching it 1/100 of that (or one one millionth or lower) takes effort you don't even notice.
- hammock 7y ago>the elastic modulus of the gears And in this case, the concrete!
- mechhacker 7y agoYup, bingo. Although every single thing, gears included, will have some deflection.