A thought just occurred to me…if you did this demo and were floating weightless, rather than sitting a chair, you would *also* start rotating end-over-end. Which would be interesting to watch!
We should clearly take a bicycle wheel to the ISS. Or maybe there’s a spare flywheel that can be borrowed for a demo. =P
Edit: I’m not totally sure what all gyroscopic effects would happen in that case, and it might get very weird quickly because the inertial angular momentum axes would change relative to your body axes. Spinning things are hard to think about.
A thought just occurred to me…if you did this demo and were floating weightless, rather than sitting a chair, you would *also* start rotating end-over-end. Which would be interesting to watch!
We should clearly take a bicycle wheel to the ISS. Or maybe there’s a spare flywheel that can be borrowed for a demo. =P
Edit: I’m not totally sure what all gyroscopic effects would happen in that case, and it might get very weird quickly because the inertial angular momentum axes would change relative to your body axes. Spinning things are hard to think about.
Physics amateur here. Why exactly does this happen? If the wheel was bigger would he spin faster?
*Gyroscopic precession demo
This needs some angular momentum arrows.
We always did this one at our high school
Would it actually work better closer to the axis of rotation (aka above his head) or further out?