# Tag Info

69

In comparing wheels of today to those in history, there are traditionally more spokes now. However, that's because wheels in the past (even large wagon wheels in not-so-ancient times) used relatively thick wooden spokes that behaved like a column and dealt with the load of the wheel with compression. However, modern spokes are very thin. Far too thin to ...

67

The Foucault pendulum is a great experiment which does demonstrate that the Earth is rotating, but it was only introduced in 1851. The Earth had been known to rotate for several centuries before that, probably stimulated by Copernicus and Galileo pushing the heliocentric model of the solar system during the 16th century. A couple of decades before Faucalt's ...

56

The astronaut can change his or her orientation in the same way that a cat does so whilst falling through the air. After the transformation, the astronaut is still and angular momentum is conserved. There is a rather beautiful way of understanding this rotation as an anholonomy i.e. a nontrivial transformation wrought by the parallel transport of the cat's ...

52

Foucault pendulum. I don't know how the ancients did it, but it is surely pure classical mechanics. The animation describes the motion of a Foucault Pendulum at a latitude of 30°N.

52

Your intuition about spinning fluids is wrong for a couple reasons. Angular momentum is conserved so an isolated system of any shape will keep on spinning unless it has a way to transfer that momentum elsewhere. If you spun in egg levitating in a vacuum it would spin forever. The more bumps, flaws, or non-spherical features your container has the faster ...

34

The error is that you assume that the density distribution is "nearly spherically symmetric". It's far enough from spherical symmetry if you want to calculate first-order subleading effects such as the equatorial bulge. If your goal is to compute the deviations of the sea level away from the spherical symmetry (to the first order), it is inconsistent to ...

30

It's a classical mechanics effect for sure although a really interesting one. Following links on "Dzhanibekov effect" one gets at Marsden and Ratiu's "Introduction to Mechanics and Symmetry" Chapter 15 Section 15.9 "Rigid Body Stability" treating this with use of the Casimir functions. From remark 1: A rigid body tossed about its middle axis will undergo an ...

25

For those that are cat-challenged, here's an alternative explanation and demonstration you can try at home! This demonstration was taught to me by my math lecturer. All you will need is: A swivel chair and a heavy object (e.g. a big textbook) Stand on the seat of the chair (watch your balance now) holding the heavy object. Extend your arms forward ...

24

The reason is that you have a boundary layer on the surface of the blade of the fan. On the frame of the blade (the blade moves with some velocity, but at the frame of the blade the air moves) the boundary layer starts from the surface of the blade where the fluids velocity is zero and as you move away from the blade, the velocity increases up to the value ...

22

The Wikipedia article you linked states: Atomic clocks show that a modern day is longer by about 1.7 milliseconds than a century ago If we take this change of 1.7 ms/century and multiply by 2.5 million centuries (250 million years) then we get a change of 4,250 seconds or 1.18 hours. So 250 million years ago the day length would have been 22.82 hours. ...

20

Your explanation is right: an earthquake can't change the axis of rotation, relative to a given inertial reference frame -- that is, the axis of rotation doesn't change relative to the "fixed stars" as a result of the earthquake. What the earthquake does is to move material around within the Earth, so that the position of the rotation axis relative to any ...

20

Angular momentum doesn't change, but the angular velocity vector does. This is effectively due to a shift in the body's moment of inertia tensor.

17

The surprising answer is that the stability of the modern bicycle has little or nothing to do with centrifugal force or gyroscopes or any of that. Look up "bicycle stability" on Google. Experiments show that the sloped angle of the front fork is very important, e.g. If the fork pointed backwards it is very difficult to stay upright at any speed. At ...

17

I think the Foucault pendulum is the best answer, but for the sake of variety I'll add another very interesting one: the equatorial bulge affecting the figure of the Earth. This is the "pancaking" of the planet due to its rotation. You can measure the geometry of the Earth without leaving its surface, and find that it is bulging in accord with your ...

16

Well, the angular momentum conservation is still the essence although it may be formulated in a different language. The top is spinning around a vertical axis and the spinning around this axis can't disappear. if the top decided to fall, the spinning would either disappear or would be replaced by a totally different spinning around a horizontal axis, and ...

16

What about this hypothesis: Dust sticks everywhere, but since the propeller cuts through a lot of air, it meets more dust particles. Thus, more dust sticks to the propeller than elsewhere. Evidence I (Mark) took photos my the fan my room to support Damien's hypothesis. The first photo is of the leading edge of the fan blade, which impacts a lot of air, ...

15

A report appeared in Science today which addresses this exact question: Kooijman et al., Science 332 (6027): 339-342, "A Bicycle Can Be Self-Stable Without Gyroscopic or Caster Effects." The abstract reads: A riderless bicycle can automatically steer itself so as to recover from falls. The common view is that this self-steering is caused by gyroscopic ...

15

Applying the brakes makes the wheel stop turning in relation to the bicycle's frame but not in relation to the road. The bike's center of mass (especially with a rider pressing against the handle bars) is higher than the hub of the front wheel. When the brakes are applied that mass has momentum toward the front of the bike that exerts a force on the front ...

14

Anything related to the Coriolis effect (some pretty pictures can be found in the link), i.e. even cannons will be (not precisely, rather seem) deflected because of the earth's rotation.

13

From conservation of angular momentum we have $(I+\Delta I)(\omega+\Delta \omega) = I\omega,$ or $$\frac{\Delta \omega}{\omega} = - \frac{\Delta I}{I+\Delta I} \simeq -\frac{\Delta I}{I}.$$ We make the following simplifying assumptions: The earth is a sphere of uniform density of mass $M$ and radius $R$. The building is constructed on the equator by ...

13

An indirect indication that the Earth rotates is the fact that the rotation varies over time. First of all, the orientation of the Earth's axis changes: long-term effects like precession and slow variations in the axial tilt, as well as small short-term variations like nutation. Precession was already known in the Ancient world (Hipparchus, Ptolemy,...) and ...

13

In your comparison with raw eggs and milk cartons, the objects (and the liquid) inside are already at rest and you apply energy to rotate them. However, the entire earth is already rotating with comparably small external torques trying to slow it down. Back to your example, once you get the eggs spinning and try to stop them, they will continue to spin as ...

13

Here we would like to calculated analytically Lubos Motl's solution to the first order in the flatness parameter $f$, $$0<f:=1-\frac{b}{a}\approx\frac{a}{b}-1 \ll 1,$$ where $a$ and $b$ are the equatorial and polar radius of the Earth, respectively, and $a>b$. (The $\approx$ symbol will from now on mean equality up to higher-order terms in $f$.) We ...

12

In elementary particles all particles that have spin different than 0, spin, i.e. have angular momentum, so photons are spinning too, they have spin 1. There exist particles and systems with spin 0 (pions as an example), those do not spin :) . Since physics started from macroscopic studies one has to look at the equations that describe motion classically, ...

12

Wind doesn't actually touch the surface. You can see the same effect on a car: even if you move at speeds beyond 70mph, the dust doesn't get blown away. If you look closely, there is a boundary layer between the matter of the fan and the air around the fan. When you get closer to the fan blades, the air starts to move with the fan (the blade pulls it ...

11

Infinitesimal rotations don't commute exactly if you're accurate enough. An infinitesimal rotation may be written as $$\exp( i a A )$$ where $a$ is an infinitesimal "angle" and $A$ is a combination of generators. Such an object doesn't commute with the analogous object $\exp(ibB)$ in general. Instead, $$\exp(iaA) \exp(ibB) = \exp(ibB) \exp(iaA) \exp(-ab ... 11 The rectangular prism is a rigid body. The equations of motion of a rigid body around its center of mass are given by: (Please, see for example: Marsden and Ratiu , (page 6).$$I_1\dot\Omega_1=(I_2-I_3)\Omega_2\Omega_3I_2\dot\Omega_2=(I_3-I_1)\Omega_3\Omega_1I_3\dot\Omega_3=(I_1-I_2)\Omega_1\Omega_2 Where $\Omega_1,_2,_3$ are the angular ...

11

No, it's caused by conservation of angular momentum. Reducing air resistance won't cause her (or anything else) to speed up without an external force. Like linear momentum ($m v$), angular momentum ($r \times mv$) is a conserved quantity, where $r$ is the vector from the center of rotation. For a skater holding a static pose, for each particle making up ...

11

Not sure if I can add much to Kyle's comment, but I'll try. Looking closely, he starts with no angular momentum about the vertical axis - the take-off is "straight". Then he moves one arm behind himself and then extends it sideways - generating a torque about the vertical axis. By tucking his other arm in tightly, his body can now rotate. At the end of the ...

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