RiverRunner and WoodenTaco, thanks for the kind words!
Presuming that you’re rolling it on a hard flat surface, you will be squashing a flat onto it as it rolls, so there will be some rolling resistance besides inertia. You will ruin its nice polished finish, which will annoy the egotistical billionaire when he catches you.
Gradients, up or down, are going to be a problem. Steps are going to be a problem. Crashing through the floorboards into the basement is going to be problem. (The ball’s plinth has a column down into the foundation!) The billionaire’s driveway of shampoo’d marble gravel is going to be a problem. Getting it into your truck is going to be a problem, unless you plan to roll it all the way home! Strapping it down, so it doesn’t decide to keep going in the same direction when your truck turns a corner is going to be a problem.
Drywall? This guy’s gone to all the trouble of the big gold ball just to show off, and his home is made of drywall? I’m thinking more of a Bavarian castle, transported from Europe stone by stone…
What about chopping it into bits on location? Could you use some kind of saw or welding tool? If you’re just looking to resell the gold, you woudn’t even need to carry the whole thing away, just carve out a few hefty chunks if that’s feasible.
Incidentally, as a matter of curiosity I did wonder why nobody of an antisocial bent had popped the Rockingham fountain ball out of it’s plinth and sent it rolling down the steps into the adjacent car park. Sure it’s 1600 kg IIRC, but still, the cup it sits in is pretty shallow.
So I had a go at rocking it, just to see if it was remotely doable. I got absolutely nowhere! The virtually frictionless water support makes it very hard to apply any lateral force, and it won’t roll up out of it’s cup when it can roll so freely within it.
Utter PITA. An oxy-acetylene cutting flame is going to be seriously crippled, firstly because the gold won’t oxidise, and secondly because it conducts heat incredibly fast. (Some older safes used a thick copper layer to block cutting torches, for the same reasons. Gold would be even more effective.) I would like to see a plasma cutter or a thermic lance versus a giant ball of gold, but I doubt Mythbusters has the budget for it!
As for sawing, that’s a PITA too. Gold is soft, but I can reliably report that the gold shavings clog a small hacksaw blade very nicely when you saw it. But at least it has a chance of working.
Ten tonnes of gold is a fair motivation to get organised, so we’ll presume you have some kind of modified chainsaw-type device. Having wacked the ball into orange-like segments, you still need to get them to a vehicle, and that’s quite a problem.
Die Hard 3 showed the sort of attitude you need to steal large quantities of gold - dump trucks, backhoes, industrial tunneling machines and a fake terrorist threat to keep the law enforcers otherwise occupied…
This thread reminds me of the part of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, where Randall Waterhouse treks into the Luzon jungle to find what’s at a certain lat-long position. He sends an very funny extended email to his business partners about it, the best line of which is
Anyway, what they find at that place is a stack of gold bars just sitting out there in the jungle. Each bar weighs about 75 kilos and the entire stack weighs about 10 tons. He then discussed the possibility of retrieving even one of the bars. Of course, this gold in a very inaccessible location, said location is controlled by a rebel guerilla army, the Philippine army is controlling access to that area, and the gold is nominally owned by some mysterious, but powerful people in Manila. But except for those minor hinderances, anyone at all can just walk off with it.
But the real question about that gold, which was never discussed in the book, is how it ever got to that location in the first place. The Japanese had left it there during WWII (after having stolen it from various Asian banks) but why was it stacked up in the middle of the jungle? Just one of those things Stephenson never explains.
I don’t know anything about anything, but what if you kept it rolling back and forth on some sort of hamocky-thingy? Or rolling around? Sort of a trampoline like thing but smaller? Just it set up so that the ball was constantly turning or rolling slightly? And if you needed you could make your trampoline out of thousand year old silk or something else very expensive. Also, does it have to be solid gold? Is there anything as expensive as gold but harder that you could make most of it out of and then just cover it with gold? I love Neal Stephenson. Love him. As far as the stealing of such a thing making the owner angry? No, people like that love being victimized and made the star of the show. They would only PRETEND to be angry as they lowered you into the shark tank.
Ok, so we can’t just roll it away. If we’re going to make it smaller and cart it off I suggest employing my children. I assure you that they are experts in demolition and gifted at removing stuff from houses in ways which I will never understand.
Of course the challenge after that would be finding the damned thing 'cause none of them will remember where they left it and God forbid they should put it where it belongs or make a map or something.
I’m popping in to rave about this way-cool house I just bought—and lookee that, it’s down the hill from Mongo Ponton. Howdy Neighbor! Hope you don’t mind some noise for a bit, I have contractors coming next week for some, um, renovations to the garage door.
If I suddenly and unexpectedly came into possession of said ball, would I have any hope of raising it onto my 1m-high table using one of those… those … move-the-ball-up-the-incline-on-two-rods-Shoot-the-Moon-type thingamagigs? (I can’t believe I found one on the ‘net. Not that I was surprised to find one for sale, but I was surprised I made it through results of searching rod ball game and whatnot). Would the gold deform and slosh through right away? Would hardened steel rods be strong enough to support it (assuming it didn’t deform first)? How long would the rods have to be to make it to the table?
For a serious challenge to the integrity of your gold sphere, might I suggest a *slightly different * blue diamond that was just auctioned at Christie’s for $11.8 million… namely, artist Jeff Koons’ “Blue Diamond”?
Maybe you could refashion your gold sphere into a massive gold ring for that rock, eh?
No, since those devices don’t move a ball up an incline. The center of mass of the ball moves down, which means that if it starts off below your kitchen counter, it’ll end up even further below your kitchen counter.
And yet it still moves…
I get that it’s not violating any laws of physics. I thought the whole point of those contraptions was that the slight momentum inherent to the initial drop (thanks gravity!) is transferred to forward/upward movement. There are limits to this, of course, but there is some vertical and horizontal movement, no? Do I need to cut the legs off my table?
100% of the vertical movement is in the downward direction, just as Chronos said. Potential energy cannot be increased without adding any energy to the system. True, it can go down and back up again, but it can never go higher than its initial position. Next time you’re around a roller coaster, check out the peaks. You’ll notice they’re all lower than the initial one (unless there are boosters along the way).
Now I’m confused. Isn’t that where the rods came in? That is, they didn’t just part a bit so the ball moves forward, through an opening wider than its diameter, and plop onto the floor. Once the ball started moving, you pushed the rods a bit closer together again, sending the ball up, off the thing, and behind the couch where it probably still sits. Doesn’t the force/energy/juju of the rods moving back together (combined with the shape of the ball and my pyramid hat) act as a booster of sorts? Or is that why I always sucked at those things?
As impossible as it would be for me to ever have a gold ball that big, it might be almost as impossible to find a big enough clean surface to put it. What a neat way to clean the living room though… “OK kids, any of your junk not picked up off the floor in 10 minutes is going to get pulverized by my giant gold cleaning ball, Yes!, even the Legos! Mwuhahahahha!!!”
The work required to pull the rods back together (to “push the ball up”) is, if we neglect friction, the same required to lift the ball. The amount of force you have to apply is actually greater because there is some component of force on one rod that is parallel to the ground that you are actually reacting on the other side. In other words, you are actually making more effective work for yourself. With a ball bearing, the reaction force isn’t significant, but for something this size it would be like trying to cut tungsten with fabric scissors. Never mind the required tensile and bending strength these rods would need to have to support this weight to begin with.
Here’s my suggestion for lifting it up. Make yourself a big toroidal bladder of some really super high tensile, non-elastic material. Slip it under the ball (if you can’t even roll the ball then you’ll need to make it in halves or with a split like a toilet seat, then seal the ends back together). Pump a slurry of liquid nitrogen into the bladder and wait for the heat stored in the ball to cause it to evaporate and expand. After it lifts up the now-chilled ball, pump water into the middle of the torus until you fill up the interior volume. (The water is just at standard pressure so it doesn’t have to be especially leak-proof.) As the water freezes, it will expand, lifting the ball off of the torus, which is no deflating as the gas within cools as well. Now build a platform for the torus up to the level of the supporting ice pillar and repeat until you get the appropriate height.
It’s not an especially thermodynamically efficient method owing to the ineffiencies in using liquid nitrogen but LN[sub]2[/sub] is pretty cheap and this method doesn’t require any heavy lifting, super long levers, a massive system of pulley blocks, et cetera. The major trick (besides this beyond exotic material fabric) is simply maintaining appropriate thermodynamic equilibrium so that the nitrogen gas doesn’t contract faster than the ice cools. This is just a matter simple axisymmetric conductive heat transfer since everything is in quasi-static equilibrium.
