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If you could spin a hand spinner at the speed of light could it affect Space Time?

If you spun a hand spinner or wheel at the speed of light could the huge G-force allow time travel?

Reply 1

Original post
by Ambitious1999
If you spun a hand spinner or wheel at the speed of light could the huge G-force allow time travel?

1.

how are you defining speed here? speed of extremities? The natural concept associated with rotation is angular velocity, but that can't be compared to the speed of light as the dimensions are different

2.

how are you getting it moving that fast? If you look into relativistic kinetic energy, it approaches infinity as speed asymptotically approaches the speed of light.

3.

Might also be worth asking yourself what the G-force actually is. The term G-force itself doesn't refer to a force, just a metric to measure forces (really more accelerations). I think you're referring more to the centripetal force which is required to keep the spinner spinning - which is the force that has to be provided by the support (string or something) to keep it spinning. First, how are you getting this thing to be structurally stable? The force required would be on the order of 10^17 N for a standard sized wheel, which far exceeds the properties of any material I know (by too many orders of magnitude).

4.

What mechanism are you suggesting for time travel?

5.

There is some gravitational effect of something spinning really fast, but that's super advanced and I wouldn't have a clue about that, but it seems to be so small that it would hardly do anything interesting.
Finally, just a word of caution: General relativity is very, very mathematically involved. Special relativity is way easier and that itself requires a decent amount of maths, arguably beyond AL FM, and making these sorts of claims on the basis of qualitative, wishy-washy descriptions of relativity, as are common in popular science, is a dangerous game. Your use of terminology probably exhibits this.

Reply 2

I guess spinning something at light speed would probably just create a massive energy issue rather than affecting space-time. Plus, anything with mass can’t even get close to that speed, right?

Reply 3

In the spirit of engaging with the question and not including a bunch of “what do we mean by” bits I offer the following.

This is a frequent challenge to the limitations posed by the speed of light. Using a lever such as a thing at the end of a spinning bar means the fastest bit is the end and that will have a mass that approaches infinite as the speed of the end approaches c. If you had a REALLY long bar, the bit at the fast end would be noticeably older” than the bit at the slow end, in other words if you put a clock at each end the fast end would appear to run slow.
This is interesting from a material point of view but I doubt any known material could cope with the forces in the bar anyway.

Can I recommend the book “what if” by Randall Munroe. Loads of questions like this without getting too much into the weeds of objections to the question and far more into interesting thoughts about the answers.

Reply 4

By the way, yes GS is involved because the extra dimensions make the maths hard however you can do lots of interesting thought experiments without having to quantify things. That’s what Einstein did first and if it’s good enough for him then

Reply 5

Original post
by Ammaniya
I guess spinning something at light speed would probably just create a massive energy issue rather than affecting space-time. Plus, anything with mass can’t even get close to that speed, right?

Theoretically, according to relativistic theories, an object travelling slower than the speed of light will never reach the speed of light, an object travelling faster than the speed of light will never decelerate to the speed of light, and an object travelling at the speed of light will always travel at the speed of light.

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