Anyone interested in helping figure out what this advanced science fiction problem?

[Dominus Atheos]

There is a room where time moves at a much faster rate compared to the outside, 1 day in the room is an hour outside, so 24x as fast.

I want to know if you it is possible to supply the room with electricity, or even water.

Would a light bulb take 24 times as much electricity to even turn on? What about voltage and switching rate?

If I drop the head of an electrical cable into the room, am I going to feel 24 times as much weight?

[Jub]

You've got bigger questions to answer than that. Does light now move 24x slower or have you just discovered a form of FTL? If it does move faster does that also mean that electrons travel 24x faster in the wires once they cross into this room? If so I think you'd be best off powering the room internally as a self-contained unit.

[Solauren]

Internal Power and water is the best solution.

If everything is moving at x24 speed to the outside, when it hits, there has to be some sort of transition adjustment. i.e all that extra velocity has to bleed off somehow. The most likely form is waste heat. Meaning that room also doubles as a very nice oven for the surrounding area.

[bilateralrope]

Sure. But that also means that anything coming out gets a boost of speed from somewhere, lowering the temperature. Does either direction dominate ?

[bilateralrope]

Lets break the problem down to identify what difficulties there would be. First the scenario itself has three parts:
- The fast time room.
- The outside.
- The temporal gradient between the two. Its thickness is an unknown variable.

I'm going to go with a wired DC circuit for supplying power. That means one cable to bring the electrons in, another to bring them out. The difficulties I see are:
- Putting the correct voltage into the room. I don't see this being difficult.
- Gravitational effects. I have no idea but that's only a problem in building the power connection and only if you run the cables vertically.
- Thermal effects. The cable bringing electrons into the room has them speed up through the gradient, which would pull energy from the cables surroundings. The cable taking them back out gets warm because of its electrons slowing down. So you'd need to handle that. The thicker the cables and the more distance they take to get through the gradient, the easier this will be. Maybe build some liquid cooling solution that transfers heat from the hot to the cold cable.

It should be possible to supply power to the room if you can run a thick enough cable for the circuit.

As for the room temperature, it should reach some equilibrium. If it's receiving more heat than it's putting out, it's going to warm up and increase how much energy it's transferring to the outside. If it's putting out more, it cools down and reduces its output. If the outside is radiating x watts of energy into the room, the room at equilibrium is radiating the same back out. From the perspective of the outer room. From the perspective of the inner room, that's x/24 watts. So the inner room is going to be colder than the outside. Which will complicate supplying water.

[Dominus Atheos]

You've got bigger questions to answer than that. Does light now move 24x slower or have you just discovered a form of FTL? If it does move faster does that also mean that electrons travel 24x faster in the wires once they cross into this room? If so I think you'd be best off powering the room internally as a self-contained unit.

Let's ignore the effects on the meaning of laws of physics for now, but you did make me realize that the area outside the room would appear 24x times darker and the room itself 24x brighter to the outside.

Batteies was what the soft sci-fi \fantasy novel i was reading when I made this post came up with, looks like there might not be a better way.

[Dominus Atheos]

Obviously this does beak several laws of physics (conservation of energy is always the first thing thrown out in any fictional story), I'm interested in the laws of physics that are just bent, not broken.

24x heat being generated is an interesting effect of this environment. Air pressure would be another problem, pressure wouldn't be easily equalized, and air that was blown "out" wouldn't be replaced, leading to a vacuum. That would have to be compensated for if people are going to stay any length of time.

What other laws of physics would be bent in interesting ways, and would their be any way to fix or compensate for them?

[Jub]

I'm not sure about physics bending but it would be an amazing place to grow food, conduct lab work, and just make time-sensitive tasks trivial.

One test I'd want to run would be suspending a living being half in and half out of the field, say a narrow hamster run that runs a ring around the field with little room to move into or out of the field but space to move forward/back and up and down so they can get exercise. Does having half of your body aging 24x faster mean you die 24x faster or does your younger half counteract this? How about muscle coordination can the animal even function half in and out of the field and what does that mean for a human walking across the threshold?

[bilateralrope]

Does having half of your body aging 24x faster mean you die 24x faster or does your younger half counteract this?

Or does it lead to a swift death because body chemistry is occurring at different rates on either side ?

How about muscle coordination can the animal even function half in and out of the field and what does that mean for a human walking across the threshold?

Having your heart on one side and brain on the other would be bad. Having your heart or brain straddling both sides seems worse.

[Dominus Atheos]

Yeah, lets say that "transitions" happen instantly with 100% of the person either in or out. Or the first foot you put through the door might be necrotic by the time the rest of yourself step through.

Good expeiment idea Jub.

[Jub]

Or does it lead to a swift death because body chemistry is occurring at different rates on either side ?

That would also be a result worth noting.

Having your heart on one side and brain on the other would be bad. Having your heart or brain straddling both sides seems worse.

The stomach to one end and bowels to the other would also be highly objectionable.

[Jub]

Yeah, lets say that "transitions" happen instantly with 100% of the person either in or out. Or the first foot you put through the door might be necrotic by the time the rest of yourself step through.

Good expeiment idea Jub.

This is probably for the best just to avoid having to be shot into the room via a canon to prevent some very strange effects on the body.

[Dominus Atheos]

But lets assume the 100% in-or-out rule still doesn't apply to fixtures that bring water and electricity etc. since that still has interesting problems and possible solutions

Although maybe we just have to put plugs right at the event horizon. A "sped up" male plug is very gently inserted into a normal speed female plug. The normal plug would still have to provide 24x the wattage (would it be 24x voltage or amperage?) at something like 1440 hertz to power an American appliance.

Something similar could be done with pipes.

I think that solves my first two problems with water and electricity.

Hey, we'll tun this scenario "hard science fiction" yet!

[Mr Bean]

Nothing says hard science like mentioning all the hilarious testing bugs that went into making the fast room work. Just a light hint is all you need to get the audience thinking and makes the fast room believable. The 24x stronger air conditioning for one or the 24x darker room for another.

[Solauren]

I actually wrote a store where someone weaponized this idea, but in reverse.

The original idea put something in an area of 'slow time', where time moved at 1 second inside the bubble = 1 day outside of it.
The technology was meant to store dangerous materials for eventual disposal, or prisoners for transport. Larger scale would be used to capture enemy starships.


It worked great, until you dropped the bubble. It was discovered that all the energy that hit the bubble, stayed 'on the bubble' for lack of a better term, until the bubble was collapsed. Then it all hit at the same time. WIth shielded ships, that wasn't a big problem. However, for say, living beings, that could result in potientally fatal doses of energy. i.e Instant third degree burns from sunlight.
(Obviously this would depend on how long the 'bubble' was sitting in the sun before transport.

A particularly dangerous individual attacked one of the main characters, who had a few small portable generators for these bubbles on him. He trapped the 'bad guy' inside one, and then stuck him in an industrial microwave oven for 24 hours, then dropped the field.

The bad guys body was powerful enough (advanced genetic engineering, biochemical augmentations, cyborg implants, etc), he actually survived when he got medical attention (which also neutralized all his upgrades).