Listen, I'm just as much a fan of spinny things as the next person, but some things spin too fast, and this is one of them. The Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility might have taken the whole thing too far by housing a machine that spins so fast it generates 1,900 times the Earth's gravitational pull.
Word from the grapevine (via Interesting Engineering) is that the facility in Hangzhou has now been booted up, although New Atlas suggests only one of its frighteningly large centrifuges is powered on.
If you're wondering what exactly the facility is, Huangzhou's government previously explained: "The project is a large-scale scientific experiment facility integrating hyper-gravity with an extreme environment. It is being called a revolutionary engineering device. It utilizes time and space compression as well as accelerated phase separation to bring scientific research to a new level."
- The world's fastest nuke-simulating supercomputer is now online, boasting peak performance of 2.79 quintillion calculations per second and other numbers my pea-sized brain can't comprehend
- GPUs powering AI will probably be the end of us all but at least they're being used to find small city smashing asteroids before they do
Now, in many ways I'm a simple man, and I appreciate a simple explanation. So here we go: It's basically a giant spinny thing that spins fast enough to cause an outward pull 1,900x stronger than the pull of Earth's gravity.
Just picture those carnival rides where you line up against the wall of a big plate and it starts spinning so fast you get stuck to the wall. It's the same basic idea—that's what centrifugal force is. Only with this one, rather than a giant plate, there are two giant arms that spin around with containers on each end. Those containers are to put stuff in and see how it reacts to all that G-Force.
And that G-Force? That would presumably be 1,900 Gs, which is about 190 times more than even trained fighter pilots can experience. So, rather a lot then.
The facility is going to be used for genuinely useful things such as researching geological processes, how different materials react under such extreme conditions, and so on.
My first thought upon hearing about this—after obviously wondering what it would feel like to be inside this contraption moments before I disintegrate and baste its walls—is that it could be used to test materials for strength under such duress for things such as deep sea exploration.
New Atlas points out another possible use that I hadn't considered, though, which is quite cool. This being to "observe and study phenomena more quickly and efficiently." For example, to see "how dams might function over years of stress in just a few hours".
Incredibly cool stuff, all jokes aside. But I can only apologise to the megalophobes in the audience, picturing the ginormous arms whirring round at break-neck speed.
