Tag: Gyroscope

Geometry of the Motion of a Free Prolate Gyroscope (and the Power of Magnets)

How should I spin the story of the gyroscope this time? Imagine, you have a wonderfully crafted elongated ellipsoid from wood (shaped like a rugby ball). You built some apparatus that make it spin fast about its major axis. Probably you can make it spin with your bare hands – or you ask a tentacled…
Rolling Not Slipping – Story of a Twirling Ellipsoid

I can’t help it – I use the first title that pops into my mind! “Rolling, not slipping” is the punchline of a mathematical argument used in classical mechanics, in the theory of the motion of a gyroscope. But I am not going to do it justice in this blog post (apart from a math…
Futuristic T-Shirts for Physics Geeks!

Have I started the elkement.art fashion brand? I have been working on the series Poinsot’s Pixel Spaceship for ages. I have been thinking about releasing wall art, but then I tested a different product – the classical print-on-demand product: T-shirts. And THIS WAS IT! This is the perfect surface I want to print this spaceship-like…
Friendly Sparkling Alien Spaceships

I know, I am again using this metaphor! But once I saw the friendly alien spaceships in these images, I could not unsee them! There is more background information about these sparkling ellipsoid and spheres in my previous post. Today I only want to show you number 2 and 3 in this series of four…
Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship (2025)

I’m presenting the recently completely series of artworks – and related physics blog posts – in its entirety! An ellipsoid is intersecting a sphere. Their intersection line is where the vector of angular momentum is seen to travel along – from the perspective of the spinning gyroscope. Four geometrical drawings, each based on the physics…
Geometry of the Physics of the Gyroscope – on a Coffee Mug!

Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape … has been the motto of the Oulipo movement, French writers and mathematicians who have boosted their creative writing by imposing arbitrary constraints. I had practiced Oulipo long before I knew the term. I just called it Search Term Poetry or Spam Poetry. I have been…
Bumblebees and Ellipsoids (Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #3)

In the movie Ice Age, Manny the Mammoth says he is not fat – just poofy! It is just the fur! I feel the same must be true for bumblebees – they are fluffy, but not really fat! And yes, these were the things going through my mind, when I created this geometric drawing: A…
Ellipsoid Intersects Sphere – Digital Edition in Progress

I call my current series Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship for a reason: There is also Poinsot’s Pixel Spaceship in the making! Same physics, same idea! The motion of a force-free gyroscope can be described by an ellipsoid intersecting a sphere: The curve of intersection is the path the vector of angular momentum traces out – from…
Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #2 – Zeppelin: Unstable Rotation About the Intermediate Axis.

Subtitle: Why UFOs are more stable than zeppelins. This UFO… … tells a story of rotation. The yellow ellipsoid encapsulates the main features of a rotating rigid body: Its moments of inertia, that is: how masses are distributed in relation to three principal axes. The moment of inertia is larger, if more mass is positioned…
Poinsot’s Paper Spaceship #0 – The Plan

There was a time before computer-based three-dimensional visualization. There was a time before any software at all. When James Clark Maxwell sculpted thermodynamic functions with clay. When Louis Poinsot described the motion of the gyroscope in terms of three cones embracing each other, boiling down the essence of a free spinning top’s motion. Today, we…
The Two Sides of Physics

Classical physics might not get its fair share of attention in contemporary science writing. But it can feel every bit as weird and awe-inspiring as so-called mysterious and spooky quantum mechanics! Statistical physics introduces you to spheres in trillions of dimensions whose volume is concentrated in a thin layer beneath their surfaces. Our intuition fails…
Poinsot’s Gyroscope and the Magic of Precession.

Nobel prize winners have been fascinated by it: You can learn about the underlying mathematics. You can solve differential equations. But do you really feel why it does not fall? When gravity tries to topple a spinning top, the top escapes sideways, sort of, by precessing: The axis of rotation is changing slowly. There is…
Poinsot’s Dancing Cones

I have always loved the physics of the gyroscope. There are so many different mathematical / conceptual / geometrical ways to capture the same thing. Lots of interesting ellipsoids and cones are waiting to be drawn! Here, I am visualizing the motion of a gyroscope free of external forces, involving three cones, following Louis Poinsot.…
Intuition and the Magic of the Gyroscope – Reloaded

I am baffled by the fact that my article The Spinning Gyroscope and Intuition in Physics is the top article on this blog so far. So I believe I owe you, dear readers, an update. In the previous article I have summarized the textbook explanation, some more intuitive comments in Feynman’s Physics Lectures, and a new…
The Spinning Gyroscope and Intuition in Physics

If we would set this spinning top into motion, it would not fall, even if its axis would not be oriented perpendicular to the floor. Instead, its axis would change its orientation slowly. The spinning motion seems to stabilize the gyroscope, just as the moving bicycle is sort of stabilized by its turning wheels. This sounds…