"""1.0342 x 10^100 to 1

The ratio is almost exactly the size of a googol, which is 10^100."""

Somehow being off by 341796308487334800992832804222885104773611498499997696000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 feels like it's not... that close.

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

Very impressive! Now let's see the reverse googol machine where the final wheel spins at an absurdly fast rate.

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'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.) :)

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

I think theoretically this machine would work in reverse.

Relativistically this is not the case.

Also realistically. Lego are not designed to deal with the stress required.

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

Prior art: https://www.arthurganson.com/concrete-1

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".

the article references this video too

How many years worth of slop is there? Can it be estimated?

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

Very nice! Now make one with ratio googolplex : 1.

;)

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?

I suspect a googolplex would outscale even the total number of possible quantum states that could exist in a volume the size of the observable universe.

Agreed. After that, Graham’s Number:1

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

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

discussed three years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851200

Neat.