h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A619751

This entry was inspired by a mistake. I *think* it was Picasso who said "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." If the person who inspired this entry is reading - thank you very much.

It discusses the weird stuff gyroscopes do, and tries to explain a little of why they do it. As ever, all comments gratefully received!

H.

Good entry. Easy to follow and understand, until the last line! I didn't understand what is meant by 'period of precession' can you explain this further?

Nice work. I think you are probably right to miss out the detailed theory, as I'm pretty sure it is impossible to explain without diagrams. I've never really understood it anyway

A couple of points. Paul Daniels is probably not known that well to an international audience. I think if you just say "set spinning on magic shows for no readily apparent reason" it should work ok.

I think the magnetic north pole is almost 1000 miles away from geographic north, somewhere in Northern Canada. It also wanders about a bit.

You might want to put in a footnote explaining what a gimbal mount is.

Same paragraph, should be "used as an artificial horizon in an aircraft".

I think that's it...

OK, some small updates, any more for any more?

H.

Great entry

Some points (take them or leave them as you please )

A former colleague of mine told a story from years ago, when children were experimenting with ball bearings as gyros. One of them stripped the ball bearing over his index finger and brought it to speed with an (umm, what's the term? a powerful air gun used in garages etc). The gyro worked as expected, but then friction set in because they had removed the grease. The balls stopped rolling and the angular momentum was transferred to the inner ring and the finger...

Gas turbines can be used as engines in ships and other vehicles. However, the spinning rate of some ten thousand rpm makes them gyros too, which impedes turning around corners if mounted in small vehicles.

A trial which employed a very big gyro in a bus, in order to store the energy while waiting at traffic lights was cancelled for the same reason: the bus wouldn't want to go around corners . Besides, it was found out that the precession force had done severe damage to the bearings too.

I can't confirm this one, it was coffee break talk: The nuclear power plant in Temeshvar, Czechia, suffered from problems because the gyroscopic effect of the steam turbine was not taken into account and they had aligned the axis in a wrong direction in relation to the earth axis -- the bearings suffered too.

Bicycles (there's a whole thread in /Askh2g2) the gyro effect of the wheels contributes to the ability to keep upright whilst driving. The sense of balance is just *one* part.


just my $0.02
Bossel

Here's the Askh2g2 thread :-) http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F19585?thread=131834 If it wasn't the gyro effect then a bicycle wouldn't keep rolling straight on, even over obstacles, if you just push it hard enough!

generally, very good, but there are a few things on the page and in this forum which are wrong.

first, you state that "Many inventors in the past have claimed to have built working anti-gravity devices which use gyroscopes, but not a single one has ever flown, or even demonstrably reduced its own weight". This is actually wrong. antigrav drives work using a very small number of possible principles. what the inventors claim to have built are "reactionless drives", which as you would expect don't use newton's reaction rule.

The inventors reactionless drives use the idea of forced precession to produce a measurable force, and this is being actively researched, as it does not fit their understanding of phsics. While it is true that no gyroscopic based space drive has ever flown, it was guite a while until rockets flew as well.

Jamie mentioned the mobility of the north pole, and not only does it "move about a bit", but the magnetic poles reverse every so many tens of thousand years.

bossel mentions the use of gyroscopes in busses for energy storage. while the bus in question may have had the reported problems, there must have been some solutions, as there are buses out there that are usin this type of system. the technology has come a long way since the initial trials in the 60's. the main problem now is the artificially low price of petrol and diesel.

I also think that you should give a serious mention to the "forced precession" research, as this has definately shown some very strange results, and deserves more than just a dismissive "well, it hasn't worked yet" type comment.

keep up the good work.

As to the busses: the storage of course works if you get the dimensions of the bearings right and either use *two* gyros rotating in opposite sense (so their forces cancel), or put the whole thing into a cardan-something suspension with an electro-motor as the driving resp. driven part to exchange the energy. Well, my example wasn't state of the art

Xyroth, in no order:

I won't mention flywheels in buses etc, because I'm aware those have been sorted to some extent and are therefore a bit off topic for the entry.

Similarly, the periodic flipping of the magnetic field isn't really an immediate problem for navigators, whereas the general mobility of the magnetic pole is, so I think I'll leave that out.

I'm not sure what you mean by "quite a while before rockets flew" - the Chinese were using them a thousand years ago, although admittedly it was a bit more recent than that before you could take a trip on one. As far as I'm aware (and please, give me a reference to check if I'm wrong, I'll be really grateful!) no device based on gyroscopes has ever succeeded in demonstrably reducing its own weight, much less lifting a load, even on an experimental scale.

Professor Eric Laithwaite, inventor of the linear induction motor, chased this particular chimera for some time in the seventies and eighties. I saw him lecture in the mid-eighties - most of what I know about gyroscopes and centrifugal force (qv) came out of that lecture and the reading I did afterwards, he was very inspiring. Unfortunately, a recent documentary (at least I think it was recent) showed him examining a number of inventor's claims of "antigravity" devices. These usually took the form of complex arrangements of gyros which when spun up, made the machine as a whole lighter. A few appeared to work. But every success was shown to be due to inconsistencies in the experimental setup, and not one ended up working.

I have to say I found it somewhat depressing, because I look at helicopters and think "There just has to be a better, quieter way of hovering than that complicated thing."

The only reference I've made to the reactionless drive was in the subtitle - well spotted! What I was banging on about in the main text was specifically weight reduction/antigravity ideas. If there is, anywhere, a company or inventor that's successfully reduced the weight of anything by the use of gyros, tell me who they are so that I can give them my pension fund money, and warn Bell, Sikorsky, Robinson and all the other helicopter manufacturers that they'd better watch out!

H.
(starting to think that if I was Bell, Sikorsky etc. I'd be looking for that inventor too so I could pay him a million or two to keep quiet... well, I said I was paranoid!)

Hi Hoovooloo - another excellent entry
I must say I found the explanation of precession a bit - erm - tricky to follow I'm afraid which is odd as I'm quite familiar with this property I just wonder if it might be nice to include somewhere something like - to visualise the precession of the earth (or any gyroscope's) precession just imagine a line drawn through the axis - as the axis precesses this line will sweep out a cone in space.
Or maybe that's just as confusing I'm probably just rambling.

Apart from that - couldn't fault it although I believe Aussies would call football soccer so that term is not exclusive to the USA

Nice work.



Orcus

hoovooloo, in no particular order, here are answers to some of your points.

reactionless drives. these are what the inventors produced. anti-gravity drives are one example, but those using gryoscopes are NOT anti-grivity.

fylywheels in buses. the reason I mentioned these is because someone mentioned them earlier in the thread, but their info was out of date. I therefore gave the correct info. as the only reason that buses using flywheels are not in general use are economic, I leave it up to you as to if you use the example, but I don't recall seeing anything about one of their major uses being energy storage (especially in transport) ie regenerative braking.

rockets. I wasn't thinking of the chinese, as they used gunpowder, and their rockets were basically fireworks. I was thinking of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovski, and of goddard, who produced well formulated theories of rocket drives, and experimental models that demonstrated them, but who's work was not generally usable until ww II, and whose ideas on rocketry are still misunderstood by the general populace.

Professor Eric Laithwaite, inventor of a science, was doing a good job of debunking perpetual motion machines, and faulty notions of gyroscopic drives, but recent work (1990's+) shows that for some definately non-standard circumstances (forced precession) the maths doesn't fit what actually happens.

regarding the debunking in general, you have to be very carefull not to end up with the cold fusion problem, where lots of respectable labs can reproduce the effects, there is definately more energy comming out than goes in, and it is definately not fusion. you get a lot of scientists who should know better saying that we can't reproduce it, so nothing can be happening and others saying it can't be fusion, so nothing is happening, and in reality, both groups are wrong, but for different reasons. if you want to go into this, then start a thread on my user page.

Thanks for the detailed reply, xyroth. I'll take up the majority of the points with you on your space.

On the subject of rockets, though - the *principle* of the rockets was being put to use by the Chinese. Those were working, solid fuel models. Newton codified the laws which could explain why they worked, and that's all the science you'd need, really. Tsiolkovsky, I think, pointed out that you'd need one for space travel, but neither he nor Goddard added anything to the basic principles - they were dealing in engineering rather than science, I'd say ("this is how to build a rocket that will carry people" rather than "this is how a rocket works at a basic level"). The only reason for the time gap between Chinese war rockets and Soviet manned rockets was the availability of detailed engineering knowledge and materials - the principles are the same.

As far as gyroscopes go, there isn't even a "Chinese rocket" level gyroscope device that will operate as a reactionless/antigravity drive, and as far as I know it isn't lack of engineering understanding or lack of sufficiently light/strong materials that's holding that up. If there was some way to build a gyro device that would generate lift, it should surely be possible to knock something up from parts bought from Toys R Us that will at least show a demonstrable loss in its own weight?

OR - am I barking up completely the wrong tree? (quite prepared to admit this is possible, in fact I'd be happy if I am, 'cos I want my own personal gyro-driven antigrav landspeeder and I want it NOW! )

H.

first, you still refer to gyroscopic drives as antigravity drives. they can't be by definition, and have to be called reactionless-drives.

as regards gyroscopic drives, lots of people are putting in lots of money investigating a peculiarity to do with a discrepancy in the law of non-conversion of angular to linear momentum.

I don't have any detailed results, but as I say, a lot of money is heading that way. most of the designs I have seen use forced precession, or irregular shaped masses. irrelevant of if the results are there yet, I think the fact that so much money is going into looking at it deserves a mention, rather than just a complete dismissal. by mentioning it the right way, you can enable them to go and search on the net for more up to date results.

for your info, try searching on google with "gyroscopic drive", and you will find lots of links.

Right. Updated - dismissal is now incomplete! Seriously, did the search and some of the links are to UFO and crank sites, others look more reputable. One of the better ones is now included. The most telling thing, though, as it now says in the entry, is that the US government won't take applications for patents for perpetual motion machines, but they WILL take applications for reactionless drives.

Thanks for that...

H.

nice website you found.
much better than any of the ones that I found.

keep up the good work.

All we need now is for some helpfull scout to recommend it.

Editorial Note: This conversation has been moved from 'Peer Review' to 'Gyroscopes'.

This thread has been moved out of the Peer Review Forum because your entry has now been recommended for the Edited Guide.

You can find out what will happen to your entry here: http://www.h2g2.com/SubEditors-Process

Congratulations!

WOW! I'm going to wish I hadn't said this, but isn't an entry supposed to be up for a week before it gets recommended? I only wrote this entry five and a half days ago! (I only mention this because I've another entry I've written (which is of course in my opinion at least as good as this one ;-) ) is still languishing in Peer Review after four weeks: go here to read and comment http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F48874?thread=130219&post=1263757#p1263757 ) Seriously though - yay! Finally an entry where I feel I'm reasonably justified in claiming sole credit. H.

Hi Hoovooloo,

I've been given your legendary article to subedit, and dropped in to tell you that you can see a first draft of this at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A622531 just in case you're interested. If you spot anything you'd like to comment upon, please let me know...

SchrEck Inc.

SchrEck Inc:

Legendary? How so?

As far as subbing goes, I don't like to interfere. If I look at it every day and comment on every little change you make, I'll just be getting in the way. Do everything you think you need to. When you're finished I'd appreciate a look before you send it back to the towers for the final polish. I *won't* at that stage go through my original and compare it word for word with the Edited version. I'll just read the finished thing, and if it says what I wanted it to say, I'll be very happy. Passing it by me before you send it back just gives another pair of eyes to make sure no mistakes have been introduced. So in conclusion - edit away, I trust you! (but show me the results before they go back, because I don't really )

H.

Hi HVL,

I should have placed after the word 'legendary', shouldn't I?

It's very good of you not to nitpick every single change that has been made during subbing. Perhaps you nevertheless could have a look; I changed the second footnote to '...they produce an action (lift) without a reaction.', I think that's the meaning that was intended.

There are no further changes planned, so if you don't spot anything that has to be corrected, I could just as well return it to the towers for publication.