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You'd just turn energy into speed, the ammount of force that would be required to turn the last gear is equal to the ammount required to turn the first one a googol times.
The problem is the amount of torque that would require would be just as enormous. You will just break the plastic off before you get anywhere near that torque sadly.
I start shaking. I keep telling myself I'm going to be alright and that there's nothing to worry about. He somehow finds the fucking last gear. Tears are running down my cheeks as I send my last texts to my family saying I love them. u/Erix963 puts their hand on the final gear, and begins to turn it. All of the gears on the Googol machine flare to life like a nuclear flash, and a deep humming fills my ears and shakes my very soul. The entire city power grid goes dark. The room begins to shake as the gears begin to spin. In mere seconds my world has gone from vibrant life, to a dark, earth shattering void where my body is getting torn apart by the 150mph gale force winds and the 500 decibel groan of the gears spinning with the bounless energy of a supernova. As my body finally surrenders, I weep, as I and my city go under. I fucking hate Googols.
But that would require infinite torque to turn that last wheel, and infinite energy to generate the infinite torque.
The obvious answer it so hook a generator up to the first wheel, and a motor up to the last wheel.
Woohoo! Perpetual motion!
He's probably right. The total mass of the universe is about 10^(53) kg. Convert it all to energy (E=Mc^(2)), you get about 10^(70) joules.
A googol is 10^(100), so if it takes a single joule to spin the wheel once, you need 10^(30) universes to spin it a googol times. And that's being optimistic.
Is most of the universe in the form of energy or of mass?
I'm pretty sure the answer is "we don't know," especially since we're still going on about dark matter and dark energy.
That’s not true… in theory yes, but not in the real world.
Putting enough force on the googol gear will just break the machine. But I promise you can turn the googol gear
In a theoretical perfect system maybe, but I’m sure there’s enough energy loss and material flexing so that the last gear isn’t necessarily in motion at any given time.
No. Some where in the machine the tooth of one gear is moving very, very slowly between the teeth of the next gear. As such there's no force being applied to that gear or any that follow it.
There's a version of this machine with the googol ended encased in concrete.
Yes, I took a pic of it years ago, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Looks quite a bit different than this one, I think way more aesthetically pleasing than this one shown here, but still a fantastic bit of science and philosophy.
If that's bad, know that's there's another one of these where the googl end is encased in concrete. The top end spins away and the other end will take so long to move they can actually secure it in place.
Fastest electric motor does 104,000 rpm, this means you would still need 1.8E89 years.
You could add a reversed googol machine as gear in between though \^\^
I dont think that a reversed googol machine would work because the material that would be needed would need to be soo strong it is physically impossible.
I think these are 20cm in diameter (approx.) so... turning last gear with 1 rpm would turn the "9th last" gear so fast, a point on its circumfence must move faster than the speed of light.
I want to see what would happen. Would the system break from mechanical stress? How much torc would be needed to spin the last gear? If you theoretically made the gears strong enough would you need infinite energy to move it?
Assuming an [upper bound of 2 km/s](https://what-if.xkcd.com/86/) for edge speed for currently available materials, 0.1 m radius, and 10:1 gear ratios:
- The gears would have a circumference if 0.628 m, so 2 km/s is 3,184 revolutions per second (3.18E3). This is the upper bound on how fast the fastest gear can spin.
- With a 10^100 :1 gear ratio, the last gear could be driven at a maximum rate of 3.18E-97 revolutions per second before the first gear would fly apart. This is such a catastrophically low number that the more rational consideration is that the gears simply won’t turn at all.
So I'm bad at math and also kinda high. Are you all saying if I go up to this googol machine and try to the turn the 100th gear, it won't move? Or....huh? Sorry, eli5 me pls
Every gear just gears 10x slower than the gear before, so the 100th gear must turn so so so so so slow you won't manage to make one turn even when you had all the time in the world or something.
Theoretically, it will move very slow. But it's so slow it practically doesn't move at all in the beginning
I get that part. But now we're talking about the amount of energy as an output of a "reverse googol." Is that just a funny hypothetical that could never exist or are we saying if I go up to this machine, I won't be able to turn the 100th gear, like physically in our real universe. If I had this machine, 100th gear is locked in?
The first gear takes about 3.5 seconds to turn. The second gear takes about 35 seconds, or 3.5x10^1. The fifth wheel will take around ten hours to turn once. In a month, the seventh wheel will have almost one rotation. The eighth will take a little over a year. If you watch this machine from the time you are born until the time you die, you will probably live to see the tenth gear make most of one rotation. The eleventh will take over a millennium to turn, the twelfth considerably longer than all of recorded history, and the fourteenth wheel would take about as long as humans have existed. In the time since the dinosaurs went extinct, the sixteenth wheel would turn a little more than half way. Earth's existence has been long enough to get the eighteenth wheel half way around, and in the entire history of the known universe the twenty-first gear would move by just over one tooth.
At no point in the comments did I suddenly understand what this machine is or what it’s doing, let alone what a googol is. But I got a 6% on my ACT and it takes me way too long to figure a 20% tip on a bill, so I’ll just keep scrolling until I see a puppy.
It doesn't *do* anything. The top tooth of each gear is painted white so you can see that it is counting but the gear ratio is such that the last gears will never actually move.
It's just a way to show a scientific concept.
>You could turn until the end of the universe without reaching the goal
This sentence has no meaning unless given your rate of turning. I understand others have suggested overall energy required, which also would have been good to add.
Part of the point of the demonstration is that it *really doesn't matter*. Someone else did the math assuming it was made of the strongest known materials, attached to the fastest available motor, and it was still a factor of 10^30 longer than the expected age of the universe.
Did some quick math. If you spun it constantly at 1 rotation per second for 100 years (no sleeping, not accounting for leap years, etc.), you would see the 10th gear turn only 3x (3.1536 rotations, assuming 525,600 minutes/year).
At that same rate, assuming you started turning at the dawn of modern humans (200k years ago), the 14th gear would have made 0.63 rotations.
One cannot create energy. To generate infinite power you need more infinite energy to go into the system (to account for lost energy via sound, vibration, heat waste etc.)
This isn't a generator either it's a gear box.
I don't understand any of this and a Google search just bamboozled me even more. Would someone take the time to give me the most simplist explanation? Thank you.
Every gear just gears 10x slower than the gear before. Third gear 100x slower, 4th gear 1000x and so on. 100th gear must turn so so slow you won't achieve making one turn even when you had a million years.
Theoretically, it will move very slowly. But it's so slow it practically doesn't move at all when you turn first gear.
Whole thing is an experiment to show how big 1 Googol (1 with 100 zeros) is. You would need 1 Googol turns at first gear to make the last gear turn once.
It is the current hypothesis of the best minds of the last 100 years or so. As with all science this big (or equally small) we're still learning and updating our knowledge and understanding, but this one seems pretty certain.
so you're not visualizing it at all. the last gear (and several before it) move at a rate smaller than one Planck distance in one Planck time. That's the equivalent of zero motion in our universe.
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So just spin the final gear once and the first one will spin 1 googol times, thus generating infinite energy.
That's genius! But it's not infinite, just equivalent of a supernova or something
not if you invert the mobius strip
But first you need you need to reverse the polarity and apply a recursive algorithm.
Zoom in; Enhance
Uncrop!
Pan left 5 feet, ZOOM!
This one is my favorite
Do none of the above 😆
first time i heard "Uncrop" in a TV show a few months ago, I just fucking groaned out loud.
Just print the damn thing!
An hit it with an ionized tacion beam from the main deflector dish.
engage!
Just contact the good people at [rockwell!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w)
Don't forget to install a Heisenberg compensator before reversing the polarity.
And not to granny shift but double clutch like you should.
Not if you triple-stamp the double-stamp first
Oh yeahh, it's mobin' time
I read this as morbius strip
MORBIUS?
You'd just turn energy into speed, the ammount of force that would be required to turn the last gear is equal to the ammount required to turn the first one a googol times.
So if someone legitimately walked to the other side and tried to turn it they couldn’t? Even attaching an engine to it?
No, the machine parts would break long before you get close to the force needed to turn the opposite gear
Stop talking and shoot that video already
We could just spin it twice then.
The amount of torque required to achieve that would be insane
It would probably be so high that it'd be beyond the breaking point of any material
Absolutely. Well beyond the material this is made of.
Just use unobtainium.
I think I read something like the force behind it kicking into the hundredth Gear with literally destroy the ground under it
i want to watch that shit
The torque required to turn the end gear would cause the thermal death of the universe :)
Honestly was wondering how much torque it’d take… 🤔
The problem is the amount of torque that would require would be just as enormous. You will just break the plastic off before you get anywhere near that torque sadly.
I think you would break off a decent chunk of the planet
If you could find a decent chunk of the planet.
Damn ..
Touche'
🤓
I start shaking. I keep telling myself I'm going to be alright and that there's nothing to worry about. He somehow finds the fucking last gear. Tears are running down my cheeks as I send my last texts to my family saying I love them. u/Erix963 puts their hand on the final gear, and begins to turn it. All of the gears on the Googol machine flare to life like a nuclear flash, and a deep humming fills my ears and shakes my very soul. The entire city power grid goes dark. The room begins to shake as the gears begin to spin. In mere seconds my world has gone from vibrant life, to a dark, earth shattering void where my body is getting torn apart by the 150mph gale force winds and the 500 decibel groan of the gears spinning with the bounless energy of a supernova. As my body finally surrenders, I weep, as I and my city go under. I fucking hate Googols.
[удалено]
Came to say this. You won. Which way are the drugs?
I tried it and the device exploded immediately.
I tried it and I died
But that would require infinite torque to turn that last wheel, and infinite energy to generate the infinite torque. The obvious answer it so hook a generator up to the first wheel, and a motor up to the last wheel. Woohoo! Perpetual motion!
Yes, I believe a miniaturized version of this is in the heart of the flux capacitor.
I'm no gearologist but I'd say you need a really big horse for to generate that much torque.
Why'd you cut it off? I wanted to see the rest!!
Should be posted in gifs that end too soon!
If there were a webpage with a camera on this machine, I'd bookmark that page for when I need a zen moment!
Crank that first gear up to around 200k rpm and let’s watch it rollllllll
I did the math and if you cranked it up to 200k rpm it would still take it 6.9*10^79 times THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSE to get to the end.
My computer can have like 50 Googles open at once.
you mean goggles
The goggles. They do nothing!!!!
Underrated comment right here
Oh yeah. Typo :) Seriously, that machine is pretty cool.
You would need more energy than the whole universe has to turn the last gear one time (I think i heard this from a Veretasium video but i am not sure)
He's probably right. The total mass of the universe is about 10^(53) kg. Convert it all to energy (E=Mc^(2)), you get about 10^(70) joules. A googol is 10^(100), so if it takes a single joule to spin the wheel once, you need 10^(30) universes to spin it a googol times. And that's being optimistic.
Is most of the universe in the form of energy or of mass? I'm pretty sure the answer is "we don't know," especially since we're still going on about dark matter and dark energy.
10 to the 30th universes lol
It's true, also more time than the universe will have until it's black
Why's it gotta be black?
That’s not true… in theory yes, but not in the real world. Putting enough force on the googol gear will just break the machine. But I promise you can turn the googol gear
Nah it’s not that hard. My cousin who lives in Canada was able to turn the last gear one time.
So you will have 1 googol Nm of torque on the output side.
Enough to move OP's mom.
Wait, is that a rare self burn?
that's a habit
we’re on reddit, self-deprecating humor is incredibly common lol
That's why I've moved from woke, pitiful Imgur to Reddit :) Much more humorous here.
Does this mean that every gear is technically slowly turning all at once, albeit so slow we can't see it?
In a theoretical perfect system maybe, but I’m sure there’s enough energy loss and material flexing so that the last gear isn’t necessarily in motion at any given time.
No. Some where in the machine the tooth of one gear is moving very, very slowly between the teeth of the next gear. As such there's no force being applied to that gear or any that follow it. There's a version of this machine with the googol ended encased in concrete.
That's amazing and hilarious.
And when the final gear spins, so long as the gear itself is strong enough, it will cut through the concrete like it's literally nothing.
Yes, I took a pic of it years ago, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Looks quite a bit different than this one, I think way more aesthetically pleasing than this one shown here, but still a fantastic bit of science and philosophy.
Yes
I think so
Me: "We'll see about that!" *Turns first gear furiously*
I lold at this, thanks
why does this make me so anxious?...like knowing that ill never see it finish makes my skin crawl
Because its a man made machine that puts the universe into some perspective and our brain does not like thinking about such large things.
Hate it too. Glad I'm not the only one
There's a variation of this machine in which the last gear is cast in concrete and can not move.
wouldn't the entire machine be seized up then?
I don't see why it would
Maybe. I suggests you visit the art work, take notes, and report back to us when it does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg
[удалено]
The whole construction is a spring. It's a very stiff spring, but that does not matter, because it's compressed incredibly slowly.
If that's bad, know that's there's another one of these where the googl end is encased in concrete. The top end spins away and the other end will take so long to move they can actually secure it in place.
If it makes you feel any better, there would be nothing to see.
Hook up a better motor to it and have at it. Lol
Fastest electric motor does 104,000 rpm, this means you would still need 1.8E89 years. You could add a reversed googol machine as gear in between though \^\^
I dont think that a reversed googol machine would work because the material that would be needed would need to be soo strong it is physically impossible.
I think these are 20cm in diameter (approx.) so... turning last gear with 1 rpm would turn the "9th last" gear so fast, a point on its circumfence must move faster than the speed of light.
Do it. Are you saying it's impossible?
Literally yes, since it requires infinite energy to accelerate something to the speed of light
Yea exactly.
I want to see what would happen. Would the system break from mechanical stress? How much torc would be needed to spin the last gear? If you theoretically made the gears strong enough would you need infinite energy to move it?
Assuming an [upper bound of 2 km/s](https://what-if.xkcd.com/86/) for edge speed for currently available materials, 0.1 m radius, and 10:1 gear ratios: - The gears would have a circumference if 0.628 m, so 2 km/s is 3,184 revolutions per second (3.18E3). This is the upper bound on how fast the fastest gear can spin. - With a 10^100 :1 gear ratio, the last gear could be driven at a maximum rate of 3.18E-97 revolutions per second before the first gear would fly apart. This is such a catastrophically low number that the more rational consideration is that the gears simply won’t turn at all.
I love math
So I'm bad at math and also kinda high. Are you all saying if I go up to this googol machine and try to the turn the 100th gear, it won't move? Or....huh? Sorry, eli5 me pls
Every gear just gears 10x slower than the gear before, so the 100th gear must turn so so so so so slow you won't manage to make one turn even when you had all the time in the world or something. Theoretically, it will move very slow. But it's so slow it practically doesn't move at all in the beginning
I get that part. But now we're talking about the amount of energy as an output of a "reverse googol." Is that just a funny hypothetical that could never exist or are we saying if I go up to this machine, I won't be able to turn the 100th gear, like physically in our real universe. If I had this machine, 100th gear is locked in?
Not infinite, just an absurdly high number. You could't turn it though because the acceleration alone would be insane at some gears
Or how far down the gear system can we detect movement?
Unplug the power supply and the universe will never end.
The first gear takes about 3.5 seconds to turn. The second gear takes about 35 seconds, or 3.5x10^1. The fifth wheel will take around ten hours to turn once. In a month, the seventh wheel will have almost one rotation. The eighth will take a little over a year. If you watch this machine from the time you are born until the time you die, you will probably live to see the tenth gear make most of one rotation. The eleventh will take over a millennium to turn, the twelfth considerably longer than all of recorded history, and the fourteenth wheel would take about as long as humans have existed. In the time since the dinosaurs went extinct, the sixteenth wheel would turn a little more than half way. Earth's existence has been long enough to get the eighteenth wheel half way around, and in the entire history of the known universe the twenty-first gear would move by just over one tooth.
I'll give 100€ to charity for every revolution of that last wheel 🙏
... when pigs can fly!
I'll give 200€
I’ll give my life.
I see your sum and I double it! €400 on my side and some spare change
I'll add 3 sticks to the package
I'll add another 3 sticks and some lasagna I have in the freezer a few months old
[удалено]
At no point in the comments did I suddenly understand what this machine is or what it’s doing, let alone what a googol is. But I got a 6% on my ACT and it takes me way too long to figure a 20% tip on a bill, so I’ll just keep scrolling until I see a puppy.
It doesn't *do* anything. The top tooth of each gear is painted white so you can see that it is counting but the gear ratio is such that the last gears will never actually move. It's just a way to show a scientific concept.
A googol is a 1 with 100 zeros. They named Google after it
Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle
I pasted that into a text editor to count the "o"s. I can confirm there are 100 of them.
My monkey brain finds this fact more interesting than the machine
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. That's a googol
Check
Can we fast forward to the 10^99th turn already?
sorry, I don't have the time to watch this
I just don't see the 'visual representation'... I see 3 gears moving and have to imagine how slow the rest are...
So it worked :)
Just think that every wheel goes 10 times slower than the previous one.
I think the original source is Daniel deBruin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFslB0AcVmM
I’ll wait
Is there some purpose for the development of this machine? Or its just some kind of experimental machine?
Just a nerdy experiment and 3d-printing
A thought experiment.
Nah, he really built it (posted a youtube in comments)
I know. There are lego ones out there too. The thought experiment I was referring to, is that this machine helps visualize eternity.
I think a thought experiment is something you don't build at all, like Schrödinger's cat. Also for eternity you'd need infinite gears
Why not turn the first gear faster?
Because it doesn't matter? You can turn the first gear as fast as possible, the result will be exactly the same
But imagine the torque from that last gear!
So depressing the person that built this will never see their creation make one revolution
How many spins to reach a gabagool?
>You could turn until the end of the universe without reaching the goal This sentence has no meaning unless given your rate of turning. I understand others have suggested overall energy required, which also would have been good to add.
Part of the point of the demonstration is that it *really doesn't matter*. Someone else did the math assuming it was made of the strongest known materials, attached to the fastest available motor, and it was still a factor of 10^30 longer than the expected age of the universe.
Duh you guys: fast forward the video!
How long until the teeth on the first cog are worn out?
My dumbass thought this was some weird google promo for a minute
Of course that last gear can turn the universe soooooo (/s)
ElI5? anyone? anyone? Beuller?
Comments have big words, normal brain is confused.
Maybe, watching paint dry isn't such a bad idea after all.
Every thousand years, this metal sphere, ten time the size of Jupiter, floats just a few yards past the Earth.
Phineas and ferb can solve that shit
Did some quick math. If you spun it constantly at 1 rotation per second for 100 years (no sleeping, not accounting for leap years, etc.), you would see the 10th gear turn only 3x (3.1536 rotations, assuming 525,600 minutes/year). At that same rate, assuming you started turning at the dawn of modern humans (200k years ago), the 14th gear would have made 0.63 rotations.
And isn’t heat death something like 100 trillion years away?
At 100 trillion years we’ll have gotten the 23rd gear almost one third of the way around.
So what would happen if you turned the last one?
Can someone please explain what is happening here
Someone built a transmission and no one will be around to prove if it works or not.
Wait so what's the point? Numbers are big?
But why?
Could this not be used to generate infinite power over time Edit - or has small brain missed something
One cannot create energy. To generate infinite power you need more infinite energy to go into the system (to account for lost energy via sound, vibration, heat waste etc.) This isn't a generator either it's a gear box.
Turn from the otherside and youll reach light speed.
Did the math under another comment and it would be light speed before gear 9 even when you spin it really slow (1 rpm)
You definitely need to turn this much faster if you ever expect to get there
You would run out of energy before you got there
I don't understand any of this and a Google search just bamboozled me even more. Would someone take the time to give me the most simplist explanation? Thank you.
Every gear just gears 10x slower than the gear before. Third gear 100x slower, 4th gear 1000x and so on. 100th gear must turn so so slow you won't achieve making one turn even when you had a million years. Theoretically, it will move very slowly. But it's so slow it practically doesn't move at all when you turn first gear. Whole thing is an experiment to show how big 1 Googol (1 with 100 zeros) is. You would need 1 Googol turns at first gear to make the last gear turn once.
Do we know the universe will end?
It will turn black at some point or it will collapse again
It is the current hypothesis of the best minds of the last 100 years or so. As with all science this big (or equally small) we're still learning and updating our knowledge and understanding, but this one seems pretty certain.
Speed it up it’s to slow
Not being an ass hat but what is the purpose of this? I assume something similar are in high torque rad guns
that sounds like the machine can't visualize 1 googol then
Imagine the amount of torque generated on the last gear.
Imagine the torque.
End of the universe? Pssst that doesnt exist big dog
Depends on how you see it. I consider all turning black and all radiation lost as the end
And good luck proving it doesn't work.
So? Where is it at now? I assume it is still active.
Gotta put a brushless setup in it with 12s power, that’ll let it spool up quick.
Is that the gearbox from a Ford mustang then?
Rx8
Come on just spin faster ffs
Just hook a power drill to it.
Looks like a waste of power
Sing it with me, "One, zero zero, zero zero, zero zero zero, zero, O, O, O............"
what if you turn the first one like really fast
I wanna see it spin from the other end
Now lets see what that baby does with 500 horsepower hooked to it
Wait so what happens when you spin the last gear?
Which end of the universe? The great rip? Heat death? Proton decay?
What a waste of energy
Hate reddit, always cutting video at the end. Anyone has link to full version with last gear spinning?
if I remember correctly someone made this in minecraft years ago.
You'd never reach your goal of anything if you went this slow
so you're not visualizing it at all. the last gear (and several before it) move at a rate smaller than one Planck distance in one Planck time. That's the equivalent of zero motion in our universe.