this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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xkcd
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Wow, dental drills spin stupidly fast. I never realized they're jamming something in my mouth that makes a turbopump seem sluggish, and that makes the scariest laboratory centrifuge I've ever seen blush in shame.
Big centrifuges are quite scary. Think of how much mass they are moving at those speeds. In comparison, a small drillbit turbine being rotated by compressed air seems less scary.
The scariest lab centrifuge i've personally seen went to something like 100k rpm, and 800,000 g. It's basically a cartoon safe with a piece of lab equipment inside, because when something fails at 800,000 times the force of gravity, it's going to end up outside the city borders, or inside the next building over.