Question on Gateways

[irriadal]

Could gate ways be used to create a prepetual motion machine?

 

 

E= Entry to gateway

W= Windmill

O= Where gateway opens to

 

O

W

E

 

Now just through some hamsters into the entry, they spawn up top, fall hit the windmmill turning it, then fall into the entry?

 

 

Or am I just mis understanding GateWays?

[Luckers]

Potentially, yes, it could be used to do that... at least until the hampster or whatever died and rotted away.

[Genesis_XVI]

I don't think so.

 

If your talking about Travelling (which I don't think you are) the "windmill" or hamster wheel could not exist in between openings, because they are one and the same.

 

If you are talking about Skimming, where one gate opens, you travel in a parallel reality of sorts, then open another gateway, it still wouln't work. While the series suggest any form of transport can be used, the platform [in this instance the wheel] wouldn't begin to move until the opening gate way had closed.

 

For the perpetual motion machine to work, the "hamster" would have to be a channeler who opened and closed the entry gateway each revolution. And one channeler couldn't put another channeler in the loop either (without some sort of compulsion forcing the trapped channeler to maintain the weave) because as soon as the channeler weaving the gateway to skim leaves the parallel world of compressed distance, the platform disappears.

 

Interesting thought though.

 

:)

[Luckers]

Actually it can. This distance between two open gats is both zero and whatever the real distance is, which is inherent to how it works as a transportation device. It you made the real distance... say a meter above the origin, then theoretically the hampster should fall forever. If you put a device between the two points like a lever that the hamptser hits every fall, before droping into the gate way then theoretically the force of gravity would result in perpetual motion... of a sort. As i said about though it would not last infintum, therefore no, its not actually perpetual motion.

[mike]

simple...

 

open an imaginary gateway in your backyard who's exit is one inch from where you stepped in. you would basically take two steps and have traveled nowhere.

open another gateway at the exit of the first one and have it terminate at the entrance of the first.

 

tie them off, stand back and throw a ball through the first one. will it move or hang in space? is there drag concered in this

 

weave these horizontally and pour a bucket of water into the top one. :?:

[Roxinos]

It would move, because the seperate gateways are an inch apart from eachother. It would move until it began to lose momentum as it would naturally and then it would begin to fall. It would fall until it landed and then it'd stop. Through that whole process, the ball would be going through the gateways and coming out over and over basically cycling through the same space continuously until it lost all it's momentum, upon which point it would stop in between entering one gateway and exitting another.

 

The water, however, is a different point. In order to make it eternal, you'd only need one gateway. Both entrance and exit facing into the sky. You pour it through the top most gateway and it'd fall through and exit the bottom gateway. Gravity would act on it and force it back down through the exit gateway (which would now be the entrance gateway) and exit the original entrance gateway only to have the same force act upon it and force it back down. You wouldn't be able to see the water except briefly because it'd be eternally stuck in the eternal yet void space between gateways. I suppose it might spread out, but that's getting into physics that I can't comprehend.

 

 

[ is a gateway, the way that the bracket is facing is the entrance. ( will be an exit, the same applying (exit point would be the direction that the paranthesis is facing.

 

( ] [ )

 

I assume that's how you mean it'd look. Throw ball through first bracket and it'd exit out of second parenthesis and fly through second bracket and exit through first parenthesis throwing it through the first bracket again, and repeating the process. Gravity and air would slow it down until it stopped the cycle and fell.

 

That's the ball example, and that's how I took your explanation.

 

It'd work because gravity wouldn't present any problem except in slowing momentum.

 

( [

 

Turn that on it's side with both of them facing up and you get the water example. Using the ball method for a horizontal gateway wouldn't work because gravity would prevent it from entering and exitting the second pair of gateways.

 

There are other ways to think of it, that might work, but I'm not going to think of them.

 

 

In short, if the entrance faced up and was below the windmill blades and the exit faced down and was above the windmill blades, then yes, it would create infinite energy.

[irriadal]

Would momentum be conserved?

If so you could cycle the hampster through the portals untill it atianed the 99.99999999% the speed of light.

 

Then during last battle open the portal for the hampster ontop the dark one's armies. The resulting force of the hampster colliding with the ground should obliterate the dark one's army.

 

Their channelers won't react fast enough to move it.

[Jonn]

Would momentum be conserved?

If so you could cycle the hampster through the portals untill it atianed the 99.99999999% the speed of light.

 

Then during last battle open the portal for the hampster ontop the dark one's armies. The resulting force of the hampster colliding with the ground should obliterate the dark one's army.

 

Their channelers won't react fast enough to move it.

 

Well, you'd have to do it above where the army was gathering, I suppose, and it woud take some time to generate that momentum, so a darkfriend channeller could probably have time to interrupt the process.

 

The other method would be to start the process in a guarded space and then change the exit location to wherever you want once you generate the desired energy., the trick being that the object would be travelling so fast that it would be hard to contain the energy. So you could use a weave to shield it off, and you'd generally have a sort of nuclear generator. The starting object would have to be cuendillar, so it wouldn't break apart in the process.

 

So once you've contained a huge amount of energy, you can keep the shield containing the energy up as a sort of tube, you open up a gateway just under the conduit. The exit of the gateway leads to your target/ So then you cut the original gateway and the enery shoots out of the tube and through the new gateway and ...BOOM.

 

You could also use this method as a sorce of energy. you'd just have to alter the containment shield so that you can channel off the energy to specific places.

[Roxinos]

Unfortunately, no.

 

Due to something small called terminal velocity, something being dragged down by gravity (no matter how eternal it was being dragged) will eventually stop gaining speed due to the friction caused by the air it's falling through.

 

The average sized person's terminal velocity is somewhere around 120 miles per hour. So after a while (about 5.5 seconds) the person falling through the air would stop accelerating and just fall at that speed.

 

If the hamster were falling through a vaccuum, however, the only problem lies in the amount of time it would take to reach the aforementioned speed. If it takes a person 5.5 seconds to reach 120 miles per hour falling at a rate of 32 feet per second per second WITH the friction of air slowing it down, then I can only imagine that it would take a hell of a lot longer for a hamster falling through empty space to reach a speed greater than our fastest land records.

 

The amount of energy that the object being dropped through the gateways would gather would be sufficient enough to obliterate it, for sure. But I don't know about the surroundings. And if it were cuendillar, then I don't know what the effects would be. But I don't think it would be that bad because cuendillar has a the ability to absorb an infinite amount of energy. In fact, the energy directed at it makes it stronger. So I don't think Cuendillar can be used as "bullet" in this experiment.

 

But I stand by that it would take too long to reach a speed sufficient to cause any sort of mass damage to an army of any sort. Even if you factor in the amount of speed given at start by a person throwing as hard as possible (a professional baseball player instantly making the object fly at around 100 mph).

 

But as for how much damage it would deal? That would require knowledge that I don't have.

 

That knowledge would be the knowledge of how much energy is gathered by a given object flying through friction-less space draggged by the Earth's gravity. Also, the exact way that the energy is spread out if, and when, the object is stopped.

[Graendals favourite]

If the thing were in vaccuum, quantum mechanics would come into play over time. As according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it is impossible to place the hamster into falling with exact placement and momentum. It will certaintly have infinitesimal perpedicular momentum. In a vaccuum, there would be nothing to stop the perpendicular motion, and the hamster will eventually drift out of the gateways' range. Even the possibility of it having perpendicular momentum, even if it is not perceivable, will at some point, in near infinite time, cause it to tunnel out of the gateways' range. Something must be added to keep it in the centre.

[Roxinos]

True. I wasn't really factoring that in as it doesn't really change the effect of whether or not the hamster or cuendillar would be viable as a weapon. Because, as you said, the shift would be so infinitesimal that it would take far longer for the object to veer out of range then it would for it to speed up to a speed that may or may not do damage.

 

Though it all depends on the individual drop. Each drop would be different and have a different drop rate. The best way to control it would be to have a sort of mechanical arm that dropped the object. Though the people of Randland don't have enough technical sense to know that.

 

And I wouldn't exactly say near infinite time, because someone dropping the object doesn't have that much control over their actions. And each drop would be different, as said before, so the chances are varying. Actually, now that I think about it, I'd say that the chances are greater for the object, if dropped by a human being, to veer off course and out of the gateway (or getting slowly cut to pieces by hitting the edge of the gateway over and over) before it reached a sufficient speed to potentially deal any damage.

[Cybertrolloc]

Ok how about:

Put a gateway at the below and above the wheel (say in a channel above and below the wheel). I.e. use the one power instead of a perspective trick to give yourself a PPM.

[Roxinos]

Well, we've already established that it's possible to create infinite energy using the gateways.

[Jonn]

What if you put a shield on the inside of the gateways' edges and use it to modify and create a frictionless vaccuum?

 

You start out with a long distance between the gateways to gather enough velocity to create a high speed and then you gradually move the gateway's openings closer to each other. You will have gathered the initial velocity while reducing the space which it travels until it is contained within a space just bigger than the size of the object.

 

It would be continuously moving at an increasing speed through the same space, contained by a shield.

 

Release the object at the peak of velocity within the upper atmosphere, and what would happen?

[Roxinos]

That depends on energy dispersal rates, as I said. I don't know enough about that to decide, but I don't think the damage would be anything of note except on the person or object that the object hits. And if it's cuendillar then the damage would be moot anyway because no energy would be released. It would just be absorbed.

 

And since you're using the OP, I suppose if you know what you're doing you could create a vaccuum in which there are no other forces acting upon the object that's flying through space except gravity. But the people of Randland wouldn't have the knowledge necessary to create such an environment.

 

But I don't understand the need or purpose of creating a stretched distance fall and shortening it over time. The acceleration would be the same no matter how much distance there is between the two gateways.

[Jonn]

The space between the two openings gets smaller yet the object is moving very fast in a smaller space.

 

What happens when molecules move very fast in a small space?

 

Remember it's not bouncing in different directions, it's dropping through the same space in one direction.

 

Reducing the space would only facilitate generating the inital velocity.

 

The shield would contain the energy in a compact channel which would gradually compress.

 

If something is travelling continuously at 100 miles an hour, gradually increasing speed in a space the size of a shoebox...what would happen?

[Roxinos]

That last bit confused me only because you said something is travelling continuously at 100 mph, and yet it's accelerating? That's kind of contradictory. Which one are you referring to?

 

[_____________________________]

 

Is the gateway's space between eachother.

 

It has all that space to travel and gain speed.

 

Now if you shorten that space to

 

[________]

 

It wouldn't gather any more energy then it did previously as it'd have to travel the same amount of space (cycling through the gateways about 5 times) before it traversed the same length of space and, thus, gathering the same amount of energy.

 

At least, that's how I see it.

 

However, if you compressed the shield that was holding the vaccuum space, then I suppose by your explanation of the way it works, it might serve some sort of increase in the energy accrual rate.

 

Though I'm not sure.

 

Also, if there is a vaccuum, there is no compression of any sort of material when you decrease the amount of space either the shield protects or the amount of space the object traverses. I mean if it weren't a vaccuum, I might see where compression of either of those would achieve some end, but now, I don't.

 

 

Perhaps if you could explain it better. I mean, I could just be missing something. Or misunderstanding something.

[Luckers]

How could something travelling continuously at 100 miles per hour gradually increase in speed?

 

And what would happen to it is the same thing that happens to every object as it approaches relativistic speed. Energy expended in accelerating would turn to mass, and as the mass dilation increased the strain on the acceleration would increase and the object would slow down.

[Roxinos]

Well we stopped discussing "c" (acceleration to the speed of light) a while ago because I said an object thrown with a normal person's arm or dropped would take FAR too long to reach any sort of speed that would start to hinder it's acceleration. Especially considering that the object does not have anything providing thrust except gravity or gravity plus the initial throw.

 

And I'm just as confused as you are Luckers on the first part.

 

And thanks for saying that, I always wondered why it was impossible to accelerate to the speed of light. I just knew it was.

[Luckers]

A lot of bad things happen if u reach the speed of light--your mass becomes infinity, time stops, you become 2d... but you can't get there for the reason given. No amount of energy in the world would help because the more energy u put in, the more mass would have to be moved. E=MC^2 baby!

 

But theoretically in a perpetual motion machine the force of gravity would cause for an increase in speed within the gravitational field of Earth at 9.8 m s -^2. Alternatively in a vacuum, if the speed is constantly increasing as John said, it would similarily start encountering that problem. It would take an absurdly long time but it would happen eventually.

[Roxinos]

Well if you're going back to the perpetual motion machine using the gateways, then you'd never encounter a problem of going too fast. Everytime the object hit the windmill blades, it'd be slowed down.

[Luckers]

Depedning on how far it fell, and how much it impacted with the windmill, the force of gravity might still result in an overall accelleration.

[Roxinos]

But since the acceleration would be significantly reduced in comparison to straight out acceleration without interference, stating the problems of accelerating to the speed of light is just nit-picking.

 

It's nit-picking even in straight out acceleration without interference (only force acting on it being gravity).

[Jonn]

That last bit confused me only because you said something is travelling continuously at 100 mph, and yet it's accelerating? That's kind of contradictory. Which one are you referring to?

 

[_____________________________]

 

Is the gateway's space between eachother.

 

It has all that space to travel and gain speed.

 

Now if you shorten that space to

 

[________]

 

It wouldn't gather any more energy then it did previously as it'd have to travel the same amount of space (cycling through the gateways about 5 times) before it traversed the same length of space and, thus, gathering the same amount of energy.

 

At least, that's how I see it.

 

However, if you compressed the shield that was holding the vaccuum space, then I suppose by your explanation of the way it works, it might serve some sort of increase in the energy accrual rate.

 

Though I'm not sure.

 

Also, if there is a vaccuum, there is no compression of any sort of material when you decrease the amount of space either the shield protects or the amount of space the object traverses. I mean if it weren't a vaccuum, I might see where compression of either of those would achieve some end, but now, I don't.

 

 

Perhaps if you could explain it better. I mean, I could just be missing something. Or misunderstanding something.

 

No, the speed of 100 mph is not continuous. I was just throwing that number out there as a sort of reference point.

 

The movement is continuous. That is what we are talking about, the continuous movement of an object basically falling without (or with very little) resistance.

 

I'm using jargon here because it's not my area of expertise, I just find it very interesting, the scenario.

 

I suppose we are delving into a scenario in which physics are affected by a kind of wormhole, except the term wormhole seems to be misleading. I always had the impression that a wormhole was a shortening of the distance between two points, considering that time and space are multidimensional when acting together to form the fabric of reality. An example being that the world is not flat. You could theoretically, instead of travel from England to China over the surface of the planet, cut a shorter path through the Earth to shorten the distance. However much damage that would cause, you will have achieved a way to get from A to B in a much faster fashion, considering the path was cut instantaneously. The fact is, you are travelling a lesser distance, but indeed, still travelling some distance.

 

The type of wormhole we have in our scenario is one that reduces the distance traveled to whatever distance is necessary to go through the gateway. There is no intervening space. Either that or it is so negligible that that there is virtually no space between the two points. This to me suggests that time and space itself is being bent and a hole is being cut between so that an object can travel from one point to another parralel point within spacetime (hence avoiding any form of time travel).

 

In our scenario, we have placed the openings of our wormhole very close together. We've done so in such a way that we have an object moving continuously in the same space, instantaneously recycling its momentum.

 

Say you drop a cannonball through and the distance between one opening and the other is 5 meters. The cannonball is about 12 cm in diameter. The interval in which the cannonball is seen is dependant on the speed it passes from one end of the gate to the other and it is repeated.

So you could probably pass your hand through the space between, safely so long as you time it so that the ball is not in the same space as your hand as it travels through.

What if you reduce the space to 3 meters? You have considerably less time to try to perform the same task, even though the cannonball isn't travelling relatively any faster than when it was in the larger space.

How about 1 meter? Half a meter? A 12 centimeter ball travelling in a 20 centimeter space...no one would dare put their hand in between, regarless of the fact that the cannonball isn't travelling remarkably faster than it was when it was moving through a space 20 times the length.

 

Is the ball moving faster?

 

Under normal circumstances there are no objects that can vacillate in such a specific space at such a rate in any similar fashion, not unlss you are talking about light and radiation maybe.

 

I'll let you physics nerds ponder it a little more. ;) It is quite interesting to think about.

[Roxinos]

First off, we know that you didn't mean to say the object is at a constant speed of 100 mph. Just look at what you typed again: "If something is travelling continuously at 100 miles an hour, gradually increasing speed in a space the size of a shoebox", this suggests a contradiction. The object is steadily moving at 100 mph yet it's accelerating at the same time. Hence, our dilemna. What you meant to say was "If something is traveling initially at 100 mph, and then gradually increasing in speed...".

 

 

What's funny is that you said that the type of wormhole we're discussing is such that "time and space itself is being bent and a hole is being cut between so that an object can travel from one point to another parralel point within spacetime". That's amusing to me because that's exactly how it's described in the books. At least, when made by a man.

 

Rand says that when he creates a gateway he bends reality so that two points are at the same point in the broader scale and bores a hole through them.

 

As for what you're saying, is the cannonball moving any faster?

 

No.

 

What's speed? Speed is the measure of the amount of time it takes an object to get from one point to another. So if the cannon ball is moving at a speed of 100 mph, then it's traveling at 6,336,000 inches per hour. That's 1760 inches per second. So if you moved the two gateways to within an inch of eachother, the cannonball would make 1760 cycles through them in one second. If you moved them apart to 1760 inches from eachother, the cannonball would make 1 cycle per second. Either way, it's moving at the same speed.