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==Explanation==
 
==Explanation==
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A {{w|Rube Goldberg machine}} is a fancifully complex system (either real or imagined), which makes use of an overly elaborate chain of actions. The name comes from an American cartoonist who was {{w|Rube Goldberg machine#Similar expressions and artists worldwide|one of several people}} who became famous for depicting convoluted and outlandish processes for accomplishing simple tasks.
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{{incomplete|Created by MAXWELL'S DEMON - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT roll away this tag too soon.}}
  
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There's a long history of people building actual contraptions along these lines. Such devices are almost never intended for practical purposes, but exist entirely for entertainment, and as an exercise in building complex and carefully planned systems. This has become particularly common in the internet age, as videos of particularly interesting examples can gain popularity online. The most common category of these systems is probably the marble run (also known as a {{w|rolling ball sculpture}}), in which the goal of the system is to move one or more balls or marbles from the beginning of the arrangement to the end in interesting ways. This contrasts to the {{w|Domino toppling|domino run}} where motions are transferred by many intermediate pieces painstakingly arranged, although both aspects are commonly combined in such contrivances.
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There have long been fascinations with complex mechanical devices, both typically practical (e.g. typical clock mechanisms) or rather more contrived. A {{w|Rolling ball sculpture|'Marble Run'}} may make the otherwise simple act of allowing one or more marbles to roll and fall through gravity (or mostly so) into a vastly more complex process. A {{w|Rube Goldberg machine}} is a fancifully complicated real or fictional device which is made deliberately complex to an extended degree, part of the enjoyment of the viewer being to see how disparate and normally unrelated mechanisms (or, sometimes, living creatures as key 'components') interact to achieve a possibly trivial, and perhaps unnecessary, aim. Beyond the US, many other names are used for such devices, named for people such as {{w|W. Heath Robinson#In popular culture|Heath Robinson}} (UK) and {{w|Robert Storm Petersen#Drawings and paintings|Storm P}} (Denmark) who developed similar themes of creativity.
  
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When [[Megan]] tries to show [[Cueball]] an example of such a video, he refuses, not because he lacks interest, but because of how he predicts it will impact him. Cueball (likely as a stand-in for [[Randall]]), has sufficiently strong interest in things like designing, building and engineering complexity that he's certain he will eventually adopt building such systems as a hobby, and that it will dominate his time and attention. Accordingly, he appears to be deliberately delaying his exposure to them so that he can continue to pursue other hobbies, with the assumption that he will eventually succumb to this one. Randall foresees the amount of time he might use if he first began trying to construct his ideas into a marble run.
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Enticed by hearing the mere mention of such a thing, Cueball knows that he is going to end up building a cool marble run of his own, with a long and interesting path to get there. In the last panel, it plays off the fact that he is acting like one of the marbles in a cool marble run. He, like the marble, is going to take a long route, one that is interesting, to get to the place where he is inevitably going to get to (building cool marble runs).
  
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Megan responds that he knows where he's going, but is taking "a really interesting and circuitous path" to get there. This draws a parallel between the type of systems he's avoiding and his approach to life more generally, which Cueball expands upon by suggesting he would do some of the things a marble typically would in a marble run.  
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A {{w|Galton board}} is a device that demonstrates the normal bell-curve distribution. It is the inspiration for {{w|pachinko}}-style games.
  
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The title text mentions specific ideas Cueball plans to incorporate into such a set-up.  
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A Ranque-Hilsch {{w|Vortex tube}} is a device for separating compressed gas into hot and cold streams. While it could not be used for separating marbles by temperature, the same principles could conceivably be used (assuming enough small marbles are poured into the machine at once, and that they do not break or chip in the process of colliding with each other) to produce a "vortex" of marbles leaving one end of the tube and a straight "beam" of rapidly spinning marbles leaving the other.
  
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A {{w|Galton board}} is a device that distributes falling balls into a {{w|normal distribution}}. Its design is similar to those used in {{w|pachinko}}-style games.
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{{w|Maxwell's Demon}} is a thought experiment by James Clerk Maxwell which would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If implemented, it would, in fact, separate the balls into fast and slow streams. The original thought experiment involved a "demon" controlling a door between two chambers. The demon would only allow fast-moving molecules to move in one direction through the door and slow-moving molecules in the other direction, cause one chamber to warm and the other to cool, through no direct 'external' work, and would decrease the total entropy of the system (which is forbidden by the Second Law), thus proving information is itself a type of entropy and you can convert between the two types.
  
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A Ranque-Hilsch {{w|vortex tube}} is a device for separating compressed gas into hot and cold streams. While such a device isn't directly applicable to marbles, one can imagine using the principle to separate a stream of marbles based on speed.
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==Transcript==
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{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
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Pinball bouncers are properly supposed to be the {{w|Pinball#Bumpers|Bumpers}} in {{w|Pinball}} machines. In Randall's marble run there will be a compartment where the walls are lined with these bumpers. Supposedly there will be many marbles on the floor of this segment of the run, which will hit these bumpers and get a kick so they will move fast and randomly around the compartment, which is where the Demon comes in.
 
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{{w|Maxwell's Demon}} is a thought experiment by James Clerk Maxwell which would violate the {{w|Second Law of Thermodynamics}}. Maxwell proposed that, if a container of air was separated by a divider, with a door that allowed only one molecule through at a time, and a theoretical "demon" were to control the door to sort high-energy atoms into one side and low-energy atoms into the other, the two sides would develop a temperature difference with no energy input. While such a system wouldn't actually be possible without energy input, it remains a compelling thought experiment.
 
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Randall's version of this apparently involves the marbles bouncing around inside the bouncer-lined compartment, with an automated system to divert the fastest moving marbles into one side, and the slowest moving into the other, presumably to output higher velocity balls into one subsequent part of the arrangement, and slower ones into another. As these are macroscopic scales this would not be impossible, just really difficult.
 
  
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Knowing Randall and his fans, some might design something using his ideas from this comic.
 
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==Transcript==
 
 
:[Megan is walking towards Cueball and showing her phone. Cueball holds a hand to his face and looks away.]
 
:[Megan is walking towards Cueball and showing her phone. Cueball holds a hand to his face and looks away.]
 
:Megan: Check out this cool video of a Rube Goldberg marble run.
 
:Megan: Check out this cool video of a Rube Goldberg marble run.
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[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
 
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
 
[[Category:Physics]]
 
[[Category:Physics]]
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[[Category:Statistics]]
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[[Category:Chemistry]]

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