What If You Could Spin a Bicycle Wheel at the Speed of Light?
Imagine gripping your bike’s handlebars and somehow spinning the front wheel faster and faster—past a million revolutions per second, past anything physically possible until it’s rotating at the speed of light . What happens next? For starters, Einstein steps in to ruin the fun. According to relativity, as anything approaches the speed of light, its mass effectively increases . That means your wheel would get heavier with every extra rotation, demanding exponentially more energy to keep accelerating. To actually hit light speed, you’d need infinite energy , which, inconveniently, doesn’t exist (even for Tour de France champions). But let’s play along. At near-light speeds, the rim’s atoms would be crushed by relativistic stresses. The outer edge would experience enormous centrifugal forces , far beyond the material’s strength. The wheel would likely vaporize itself before hitting even a fraction of light speed. Time dilation would also kick in: from the wheel’s perspective, time slow...