Comment on wat
sneezycat@sopuli.xyz 1 hour agoIt’s actually simpler: the stick will deform because whatever movement you do travels at the speed of sound of the material the stick is made out of.
Comment on wat
sneezycat@sopuli.xyz 1 hour agoIt’s actually simpler: the stick will deform because whatever movement you do travels at the speed of sound of the material the stick is made out of.
midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 hour ago
Why does it matter how long it takes for the torque to travel down the stick? The question was about the speed of the tip in the orbital direction, not the speed of the wave in the radial direction outward.
sneezycat@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
I see your point. Still, it shows there’s no such thing as a “super duper stick” because there’d be shearing forces pulling the atoms apart faster than they can move together.
midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 hour ago
Yeah that’s the boring answer, it would just break apart. But even without physical limitations, mass has the property that it can’t be accelerared past c with a finite amount of energy, and I think it’s interesting to see why that limit is more fundamental than the structure of matter. No matter how you mess with forces using simple machines, the energy calculations always come out the same.