The Carousel Boutique at 6x10^8 RPM or about 1.86x10^5 MPS

[Night Sky 1,387]

Using magic, Spike has spun the Carousel Boutique up to something like 0.90-0.99c! Fully 10^16 g of centripetal force. His objective was to use time dilation, body frame dragging and delocalization to create multiple Rarity's. In point of fact, Rarity is delighted and thrilled, and is now dancing around, reveling in her brand new relativistic probability cloud.   

Spikey Wikey, of course, is experiencing Nirvana, but Twilight Sparkle isn't so pleased, and I'm going to tell you why. 

See, spinning the Carousel Boutique that fast, on the surface of Equus, in the middle of Ponyville, causes it to start generating about:

10^24 joules OR 10^9 megatons of TNT.

Those energies effectively turn the Carousel Boutique into a mini-Quasar or Type II Supernova. The problem we're running into here is how dense the surrounding environment is. Neutron Stars and the Accretion Disks of Black Holes naturally occur in the near vacuum of space. When the Carousel Boutique starts to move like either of those in a dense atmosphere, all kinds of contingencies do start to emerge. 

What do we have? 

Well let's see; catastrophic atmospheric drag and thus heating, plasma toruses, gamma rays, fusion rings, air blasts, to name a few among many other complications. 

Mayor Mare is not gonna be pleased, actually Princess Celestia and Princess Luna won't be either. 

But Spike just wanted to harness the magic of Terrell Rotation, along with Relativistic Aberration, Doppler and Beaming effects.

It's all about his beloved Rarity, and frankly she finds it all quite fetching!   

Edited Sunday at 12:17 AM by Night Sky

[Ishmael 85]

Fantastic. A practical application for Terrell rotation!

But would you have to spin all the way to 0.9c to get these effects? You'd get some of them at much lower speeds? I don't know, just thinking aloud.

[Night Sky 1,387]

7 hours ago, Ishmael said:

Fantastic. A practical application for Terrell rotation!

But would you have to spin all the way to 0.9c to get these effects? You'd get some of them at much lower speeds? I don't know, just thinking aloud.

Actually, 0.90c is the bottom end for any dramatic, true Relativistic Visual Distortions. I assumed a smallish two story building, roughly cylindrical, about 2500 Sq.Ft., perhaps 75 tons to 150 tons. 

Even at 0.90c, the really crazy stuff would only just be setting in. To get the real crazy effects Spike wants, you basically gotta go up to 0.99c

Importantly, the visual effects themselves are purely a result of velocity. Mass and density have nothing to do with the visual distortions directly.

Spin anything fast enough and you'll get them.

But an object like the Carousel Boutique does not typically move like a Neutron star, or the Accretion disc of a black hole. 

Add a dense atmosphere around it, and you're very quickly going to have problems, wherever you are on the planet.

Safety would be somewhat past the moon's orbit of Earth, those Gamma Rays, X-Rays and Pair Productions really sting. 

But yes, below 0.90c the effects I described are gonna be negligible, or absent entirely for the Carousel Boutique.

From the point of view of what Spike is after, the faster the better, of course.

Edited Sunday at 07:05 AM by Night Sky

[Ishmael 85]

Nice explanation. Any general-audience accessible books on the subject you'd recommend? Been a long time since I've read any cosmology....

[Night Sky 1,387]

1 hour ago, Ishmael said:

Nice explanation. Any general-audience accessible books on the subject you'd recommend? Been a long time since I've read any cosmology....

Because it is an older book, start with John Gribbin's In Search Of Schrodinger's Cat, and warm up with some quantum mechanics. Even though it's separate from relativity per se, to get a clear conceptual picture of what happens to the Carousel Boutique under Relativistic conditions...you need the quantum mechanics too. 

Then try to tough through Richard Feynman's QED, that's gonna be harder, but stick with it. Gribbin's book is a good way to warm up. You can't understand anything about anything on a deep level, frankly, if you don't understand what Feynman deals with in QED. Almost everything apart from gravity is involved with Quantum Electrodynamics. 

Typically, everyone says that it is harder to understand Quantum Mechanics than Relativity. Depends what you mean by understand. Einstein's book for dummies on Relativity is disappointing. It is hard to follow and assumes you're good at math. So does Max Born's book, but of the two, I'd go with his: Einstein's Theory Of Relativity. 

I'd much prefer you went for John Stoddard's Relativity: The Special And General theory. Stoddard is good at what he does. 

Becky Smethurst has written A Brief History Of Black Holes, which is excellent. Speaking of which, I am going to advise you to approach Steven Hawking with caution, full disclosure, I'm critical of him, and actually so are a lot of scientists. Roger Penrose is more of the camp I'm in, but it's a bias. 

Beyond this, read on Antimatter, and Neutron Stars and Neutrinos. I can give you titles for those too if you want.

But this, all of this...these are all to be understood as different facets of the same creation. And when you do something as extreme, and absurd as spinning the Carousel Boutique up to almost light speed, you really need all of them to get a coherent picture of what would really happen. 

I had to do some specific calculations to describe this scenario scientifically, even in a half assed way. All these books will give more insight into why it is a zany, absurd and profoundly lethal situation, and how all that plays out. Cheers. 

 

Edited Sunday at 10:04 PM by Night Sky

[Ishmael 85]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I only ever got to precalculus mathwise; heavy duty stuff is beyond me, so hopefully these aren't too heavy. Hopefully none of these are like Godel, Escher, Bach!

I'm a big fan of Feynman's popular books (Surely You're Joking and What Do You Care What Other People Think), but don't know QED. Hopefully the library has a copy.

I've always loved science, but didn't think I was smart enough to pursue it. I've gotten so much out of popularizations of the harder science though, like Brian Greene. Cosmos got ten year old me on the train, and I've never gotten off. 

[SidewinderX 199]

On 2025-11-14 at 9:45 PM, Night Sky said:

Using magic, Spike has spun the Carousel Boutique up to something like 0.90-0.99c! Fully 10^16 g of centripetal force. His objective was to use time dilation, body frame dragging and delocalization to create multiple Rarity's. In point of fact, Rarity is delighted and thrilled, and is now dancing around, reveling in her brand new relativistic probability cloud.   

Spikey Wikey, of course, is experiencing Nirvana, but Twilight Sparkle isn't so pleased, and I'm going to tell you why. 

See, spinning the Carousel Boutique that fast, on the surface of Equus, in the middle of Ponyville, causes it to start generating about:

10^24 joules OR 10^9 megatons of TNT.

Those energies effectively turn the Carousel Boutique into a mini-Quasar or Type II Supernova. The problem we're running into here is how dense the surrounding environment is. Neutron Stars and the Accretion Disks of Black Holes naturally occur in the near vacuum of space. When the Carousel Boutique starts to move like either of those in a dense atmosphere, all kinds of contingencies do start to emerge. 

What do we have? 

Well let's see; catastrophic atmospheric drag and thus heating, plasma toruses, gamma rays, fusion rings, air blasts, to name a few among many other complications. 

Mayor Mare is not gonna be pleased, actually Princess Celestia and Princess Luna won't be either. 

But Spike just wanted to harness the magic of Terrell Rotation, along with Relativistic Aberration, Doppler and Beaming effects.

It's all about his beloved Rarity, and frankly she finds it all quite fetching!   

Idiot here: wouldn't that much rotational velocity slam them against the walls from centrifugal force? I admittedly don't know much about cosmology, but I recall from my research on fighter aircraft that the average pilot, wearing a G-suit, can tolerate at moat 9 Gs, and even then only for a second or two at most. A F-16's airframe can sustain about 9-10 Gs, and IIRC any flight where a fighter experiences more than 6 or 7 Gs will be subject to a structural inspection after landing. 10^16 Gs would probably tear the Boutique apart, or at least near-instantly kill any occupants as they are forced against the walls and crushed.

Is all this correct, or am I missing something? I did take physics back in college, but this is admittedly above my pay grade. 

[Night Sky 1,387]

5 hours ago, SidewinderX said:

Idiot here: wouldn't that much rotational velocity slam them against the walls from centrifugal force? I admittedly don't know much about cosmology, but I recall from my research on fighter aircraft that the average pilot, wearing a G-suit, can tolerate at moat 9 Gs, and even then only for a second or two at most. A F-16's airframe can sustain about 9-10 Gs, and IIRC any flight where a fighter experiences more than 6 or 7 Gs will be subject to a structural inspection after landing. 10^16 Gs would probably tear the Boutique apart, or at least near-instantly kill any occupants as they are forced against the walls and crushed.

Is all this correct, or am I missing something? I did take physics back in college, but this is admittedly above my pay grade. 

10^16 G's would absolutely tear the Boutique apart. The shearing forces resulting from that figure upon any normal matter are incomprehensible. And, you would need far few than 10^16 G's to kill anyone that we would recognize as a life form.

10^16 G's will not stop after tearing molecules apart, it will tear electrons away from atoms. Shear destroys anything held together by electromagnetic force. Biological matter is fragile, you'd already be dead, but it's gonna start coming apart at perhaps 30 G's sustained.

The strongest known metals will all have failed by 10^5 G's or thereabouts. 

10^14 G's will tear electrons away from nuclei. 

Incidentally, you're not gonna overpower the strong nuclear force, that would require about 10^47 G's (not a typo) and alas even the Carousel Boutique isn't generating anything near that kind of power. Inside of a Neutron Star maybe, or perhaps centimeters away from the event horizon of a stellar mass black hole, you might encounter something like that.   

Remember, our hypothetical assumes several entirely impossible things;

1.) We assume that The Carousel Boutique does not fly apart long, long before it reaches 0.99c.  

2.) We assume that Spike, Rarity and Twilight Sparkle are not killed by the acceleration. Given that MLP FIM is a twenty minute cartoon show, the acceleration would probably take five to fifteen seconds of screen time tops. To get up to 0.99c in that amount of time, with 75 to 150 tons of normal matter in a dense atmosphere, is an unthinkable rate of acceleration in the face of cataclysmic atmospheric drag. 

Yes, it is true that mass is in one sense not a factor, the centripetal acceleration is purely geometric (speed and radius). But mass does matter for energy content, drag and stresses.  

3.) We assume that conditions within the Carousel Boutique do not become even more hostile to life than anywhere else on the entire planet. In reality, conditions within the Boutique would be profoundly more lethal, by orders of magnitude. Safety from the radiation alone would be maybe 5.7 times the distance of the Moon from the Earth, but that may be an optimistic figure. Remember, the Carousel Boutique will be generating relativistic jets at both of its poles. Admittedly, they'd be as narrow as laser beams, but still deadly kiloparsecs away in the case of a direct hit.   

So yes, the G forces would kill them and destroy the boutique, and the G's may well be the first thing to do so. Although I must stress that the toroidal plasma, gamma rays, x-rays, fusion envelopes and continuous air blasts would arrive very, very quickly. Without doing additional calculations, I am not quite sure what kills them first. It may well be the G forces, but they'd also be vaporized by the heat and sterilized by the radiation almost as quickly. 

See, we're not entirely sure about all the details of Spike's spell. Maybe it was a "snap your fingers, get this speed" type of spell. If the Carousel Boutique experienced no acceleration prior to achieving 0.99c, and if none of the above assumptions hold, then Spike, Rarity and Twilight Sparkle are profoundly dead for about half a dozen reasons. Perhaps it's not scientifically meaningful to trouble over what exactly got them first. Generally though, I'd say the G forces would get them first, assuming anything even vaguely resembling a normal acceleration. 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by Night Sky

[Night Sky 1,387]

On 2025-11-16 at 11:22 PM, Ishmael said:

Thanks for all the suggestions. I only ever got to precalculus mathwise; heavy duty stuff is beyond me, so hopefully these aren't too heavy. Hopefully none of these are like Godel, Escher, Bach!

I'm a big fan of Feynman's popular books (Surely You're Joking and What Do You Care What Other People Think), but don't know QED. Hopefully the library has a copy.

I've always loved science, but didn't think I was smart enough to pursue it. I've gotten so much out of popularizations of the harder science though, like Brian Greene. Cosmos got ten year old me on the train, and I've never gotten off. 

Stay on the train. Don't get off. Even if you're not destined for the math, the concepts are nothing if not practical. And science needs to refocus itself back on inspiring ponies, in the worst sort of way, ASAP. Gödel was amazing, and the Incompleteness Theorem is one of those discoveries that makes you feel happy to be alive. Feynman had a singular wit, but he really was a contributor of the first order. It's rare for someone like him to embrace talking to the rest of us as much as he did.  

Edited 5 hours ago by Night Sky