Lego Googol Machine

At the 350 rpm of the input gear it’d be early by only 1.3x10^80 times the age of the universe.

If only the lego gears (and your arm) could withstand the force required to turn that crank!

I'm sure there is a physics professor somewhere just typing a homework for students to calculate the required turning speed for the last wheel to reach lightspeed on the outer edge and what kind of energy would be needed to spin all those wheels up (ignoring any friction, etc.) :)

saw this some time ago:

"Spinning a Lego wheel Over 100,000 RPM!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZHPXTd4xd0

it was posted on HN too, but no discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653532

I think theoretically this machine would work in reverse.

Relativistically this is not the case.

Pretty sure if that was possible the resulting transfer of energy would destroy the entire universe.

To be fair, this is neither done in LEGO, nor has it anything to do with googol.

But you're right that there are many similar machines. I've seen them in two different museums and it's always great to make you think about time and "infinity".

Or, if you attached the last piece to a concrete wall, how long would it take the machine to break?

You need to consider relativistic effects, if you want to turn the first wheel fully around in your life time.

Agreed. After that, Graham’s Number:1

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number

It is an interesting problem.

You obviously can't do it with gear reduction as you would need more gears than is material for making them in the universe.

The idea would be to make a mechanical computer that spins the last wheel based on some computation, but then, there is the problem that the state would be googol-sized, which wouldn't fit in our universe either.

Is there a way? We probably need fancy physics for that. Quantum effects, maybe?