What's the fastest we've ever spun anything?

And somewhere, the last tiny bit of White Nights that had not become outdated cried.

Well, the way I phrased the question, I was including someone stuck in a spinning-in-place machine with the dial cranked way up, not just human-powered spinning.

Seems like a test that someone would have done at some point.

Yeah, but it’s 3,600,000,000 rph!

Possibly an astronaut-to-be in a multi-axis trainer, then?

:confused:
I’m trying to reconcile that with what I read here:

Well, for a small value of “relativistic”, anyway.

Presumably, there’s some hard upper limit for this (unattainable by anything mechanical that we could make, no doubt) - something like a circle of radius (or maybe circumference) of one Planck length, rotating for a rim speed of c?

Not the fastest, but worth mentioning, is the XF-84H; an experimental aircraft of the 1950s. To address the limitations of early jet aircraft, this was a turboprop where the tips of the propeller blades spun at Mach 1.18.

There’s a reason you’ve never heard of it. Several reasons, in fact.

Are some of those several reasons embedded in the turboprop’s housing?

Relevant news article this morning:

[QUOTE=BBC]

A team of researchers claims to have created the world’s fastest spinning man-made object.

They were able to levitate and spin a microscopic sphere at speeds of up to 600 million revolutions per minute.

[/QUOTE]

Here is an interview with the folks that did it.

That’s exactly what I was thinking when I clicked on this thread. Gravitational slingshot, to be exact.