Originally posted by richjohnson
Why would a normal rope be immune to the expansion?
I was thinking about that, I think the rope would expand but if so
it would just contribute to the overall stretching forced on it by the
receding planets. Remember, the rope is attached to a giant
spindle (as if!) and any expansion will try to pull the rope apart, so
either way the spindle turns, free lunch. At least till the rope runs out.
So you have a few thousand light years of rope twirled about the
spindle! I wonder how big that would be. Say a rope one CM in
diameter, 1000 light years long wrapped around a spindle one
thousand miles in diameter and one million miles long.
Now THATS a spindle!
Of course we are talking about a rope 10 million light years long that is glued at the center and the spindle twisted about the rope so both
ends are being drawn together during this phase of its construction.
Note the engineers have already figured out the energy needed to
simply wind up the spindle is a thousand times less than the energy
derived from the unwinding because it can be done against a
generator which would try to stop the unwinding so you do get free
energy. So lets make it 2000 light years of rope in total. How big is the spindle, that is to say what would the total diameter of the spindle
plus the rope with 2000 light years of rope wrapped around a spindle
where the rope is one CM in diameter, the spindle is one thousand
Km in diameter and one million Km long.
Here is something heavy enough for anyone:
04 Feb '06 00:32
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