[ExI] A Gedanken Bike Experiment

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-10-29 05:16, spike wrote:
> Thanks for that Anders.  I sent them a number of ideas, but the one which intrigues me the most is an idea I had about filling a tire with a type of metal alloy which melts at a temperature slightly lower than that of boiling water.  I may have posted something about that a couple months ago, don't recall.  A eutectic alloy of tin, lead and bismuth makes a high density, low melting point metal (about 97C) which you could use to fill a motorcycle tire.  It would look perfectly normal but would weight over 200 kg for the front and nearly 300 for the back.
>   
> If you had one on the front and everything else normal, the CG of the bike/rider combination would be moved down and forward, which would allow a prole to ride up ramps of impossible-looking angles, assuming of course one had some kind of traction enhancement, such as vertical nail points poking up about half a cm.
>   

I don't know much about bike dynamics, but I suspect the liquid metal 
would be tricky to have in the tires. The most obvious reason is that it 
would accumulate downwards, ballooning the tire. But if the tire 
rotates, then the bulge would tend to be behind the lowest point, and 
exert a slowing force.

At higher rotation rates I predict you will get fun but problematic 
standing modes that will likely make the tire non-round. A bit like
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcizFC-Qt_U
and especially
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z4QdiqP-q8

In any case, it would be fun to test.

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20131029/28ae9eca/attachment.html>