Summary
The Room of Spirit and Time fromDragon Ballmay be implausible, but not impossible to replicate.On the official Dragon Ball website, Professor Nobuyoshi Ohta, a researcher of elementary particles and gravity, was interviewed about the mechanics of the manga’s training room. According to him, creating a way to train a year in a day isn’t impossible, though it comes with some caveats.
Also called the"Hyperbolic Time Chamber", this high-gravity, low-oxygen, time-warped plot device saw use acrossDragon Ball Z,where various heroes trained for their battles against Cell and Super Buu. Ohta weighed on the feasibility of the Room in reality, be it its time dilation, teleportation, and environment.
As it turned out, despite coming from a place of pure fiction, science has observed how parts of it exist in real life.
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As an expert in gravity, Ohta is intimately aware of how the perception of time changes under different strengths. “If it were as though a year had passed in another place, but it has only been a day for me; that sort of phenomenon has been observed,” the professor explained. “You see, time flows slower where there is stronger gravity.” Therefore, rather than suggest a space for a character to train,Ohta instead suggested throwing a villaininto a high-gravity space, like Jupiter or the sun – while they would experience a day, a hero on Earth would have a year to train.
Another alternative the physicist offered was near the event horizon of a black hole. While gravity is weak there, time also flows very slowly. When pressed on what size a black hole would be to create a time difference of a year to a day, Ohta said one would need the mass of one billion Earths to create the effect. He also spoke about the feasibility of other aspects of the Room, like its teleportation abilities. Sadly, folding space requires knowledge science hasn’t discovered. “No research has found any proof of a world with more than three dimensions,” Ohta answered.
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While the room’s low oxygen level and higher gravity would be dangerous for most, “Anyone who could manage to survive any length of time in that room would come back much stronger”, the physicist agreed. The Room of Spirit and Time has remained a recurring presence throughout the late Toriyama’s universe, even turning up as late asDragon Ball Super. Thanks to Nobuyoshi Ohta, fans should be pleased to know that while some parts ofDragon Ballare fantastical, getting a year’s training in a blink of an eye might turn out to be one of the less outlandish parts.
Dragon Ball
From the creative mind of Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball is a mega multimedia franchise that spans back to the 1980s. Dragon Ball expanded quickly, starting as a serialized manga for Weekly Shonen Jump in Japan. It made its way overseas via manga and an anime adaptation that is enjoyed worldwide. Dragon Ball was the initial starting animated series that followed the adventures of the young Son Goku as he sought after the Dragon Balls. These mystical orbs would grant the wish of any who gathered them together. Then, the series would branch off into the immensely popular Dragon Ball Z, which followed Goku as an adult and featured high-intensity battles and Goku’s never-ending search to be the strongest. The series has also enjoyed several popular video game adaptations and continues to release several new animated series and theatrical films up to the recent popular Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero.
