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29 March 2024 14:00

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Question

Asked by: Glenn Hawkins
Subject: Laithwaites demonstration
Question:
If we watch this clip we can understand part of the mechanics and they are not tricks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLMpdBjA2SU Start watching at 3.2, the end of the demonstration.

It is about leverage. When holding the shaft of a none a spinning gyroscope with two hands, one hand must force down as the other forces up. The toque of the downward hand push is added to the uplift of the other hand. If you ignore the leveraged toque, the thing feels heavier than it actually is when it is not spinning. When the spun-up gyroscope is pushed/forced in a horizontal curve the gyroscope moves upward and all its weight is converted to torque directly down on the single hand that holds it up. No downward leveraged force then exists to be added to the lifting hand and so the wheel is easier to lift. The trick is only a lack of an explanation. That is the trick, not of mechanics. What you see happening is real.

There is more to it. The wheel arcs upward in a curve inward and upward. When the hand lifts upward at the same speed of the rising gyroscope, the wheel cannot curve inward, only upward. And because of the conservation of energy, the power for the inward arch of the gyroscope is converted fully to the upward lift and so requires less energy from the man. More, the lifting energy is already paid as the man is holding the wheel up. The additional force necessary to lift it higher is only to overcome the inertial resistance of the wheel. It would be about equal to slowly rolling a 40-pound bowling ball across the floor with one finger. The leverage struggle the man experience is because he must straighten his elbows and shoulders. The wheel is never lighter but it is easier to lift.

The London Academy of Science stated only that they were not amused. They said nothing more. You would think they would get off their lazy ass’, reason out an explanation, and publish it.
Date: 24 April 2021
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Answers (Ordered by Date)


Answer: Nate - 25/04/2021 02:28:06
 Thanks Glen for the most rational explanation of Laithewaite's demo ever!

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Answer: Glenn Hawkins - 25/04/2021 03:24:47
 Thank you, Nate. I am happy you are able to understand mechanics so easily. You're special.

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Answer: dave brown - 25/04/2021 05:11:58
 sounds familiar

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Answer: Gardner Martin - 25/04/2021 15:57:34
 Glenn,
you are making far too heavy weather of the whole thing. Yes, it is all about the torque. When the wheel is not spinning ('gyroscope' is entirely the wrong term BTW) the weight acts through the centre-of-gravity of the Laithwaite-rod-wheel system, which is some distance from his feet. Even if Laithwaite was strong enough to hold the wheel up in that position, he would probably still fall over because the C-of-G would be outside of his 'footprint' (elementary principle of statics). Now, when the wheel is spinning and precession is occurring, the weight acts through his hand. He has only to support the weight; there is no longer any torque. There is also no danger of overbalancing. I call it a trick because magicians routinely use a form of misdirection in which they comment upon their actions ... but lie. It is known to have a very powerful psychological effect. Uri Geller used the ploy when he said, "can you see it bending?" while holding a spoon which he had already covertly bent. Laithwaite was pulling the same trick when he implied - by words and action - that the wheel had become lighter. See? Cheap trick. Nothing more to explain.
PS Laithwaite (even the title 'professor' makes him sound like a seedy stage magician) did not perform at the 'London Academy of Science' (if it even exists) nor at the Royal Society of London (which sucks-up to James Dyson BTW) but at the lower-brow Royal Institution.
PPS The spinning-top has been known for thousands of years, the gyroscope for only a few hundred years old (and is entirely unsuitable for stunts). Do not confuse them.

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Answer: Glenn Hawkins - 25/04/2021 17:56:51
 A short and simplified explanation of a video that confused a world for decades is, “too heavy?”. What bull shit, and you tell me what not to do? There is a cause for everything and an explanation in waiting to be found. Your words are used only to cover that you never reasoned out and explained anything that was poorly understood. You just sprout words to be contrary and hateful, which makes you a pimple on a man’s ass. Your whole thread is redundant preterism. It is old stuff, elementary, partly unrelated, and useless to this post. I have asked you politely for the last time to go crawl in a hole, if you continue to disobey me, then create your own posts.

You owe Sandy a God Damned apology.

I’ll go further, you are disgraced for attacking an old gentleman’s long-deceased father, neither of whom you ever knew, nor was either an adversary, nor disagreeable toward you, nor had they ever contacted you or disparaged against you—they being complete strangers. You are some piece of work.

And, you have destroyed this whole post.


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Answer: Sandy - 25/04/2021 21:03:15
 Gardner Martin or whoever?
It would not matter what name you use you are not clever enough to hide your identity, you have a serious character flaw which always forces you to attack the same persons or issues, with venom and the same childish comments.

However, that said the explanation you gave for the lifting of Laithwaite’s large flywheel was absolute rubbish and you know it.
Scientist you may call yourself but scientist you most certainly are not.
You could not accept Laithwaite’s explanation because of your university brainwashing.

If you wanted to beat the man do it by a scientific method not by belittling his character and by lies, assumption and guess work.
Your explanation was nearly as inept as that of Veritasium’s Anti-Gravity Wheel on YouTube.
If you count the number of hits on that program you can surely see the massive disservice you and they are doing to the impressionable.
Out of common decency research the thing properly and publish the correct answers, to the Veritasium crowd as well.
A Bit of Truth??
Sandy Kidd.

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Answer: Nate - 25/04/2021 21:16:09
 ... "understand mechanics so easily." ... made me laugh!
But, thanks for the compliment. :)

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Answer: dave brown - 26/04/2021 01:15:43
 i have already found and posted the answer(s).
all of this is going around me to try to steal it.
if not to steal it then... ...oh my there is a saying that says i should find another room.

hi again martin

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Answer: Sandy - 26/04/2021 11:20:30
 Dave Brown,
Nobody is interested in stealing any information you have posted.
You are just one of thousands including myself who have published their particular version of everything and anything to do with gyroscopes.
We all know that the physics relating to the behaviour of gyroscopes and flywheels, is in serious error due to mathematical assumptions made many years ago.
That said, you will surely know by now that the dabblers in gyroscopes, dabblers being “the shed dwellers” and that the dabbling in gyroscopes is for the sole purpose of generating inertial thrust, that those dabblers tend to stick tenaciously to their own preconceived ideas of what transpires.
In light of the shortage of real physical proof is that so hard to understand?.
Sandy Kidd

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Answer: Gardner Martin - 27/04/2021 00:10:50
 Glenn,
your explanation was considerably more complicated than mine, even if it said the same thing ... which I am not even sure of in view of your superfluous references to torques and counter-torques and moving in circles, etc.

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Answer: Gardner Martin - 27/04/2021 00:26:13
 Sandy,
you would not acknowledge the truth if it bit you. Oh it did, years ago and that is why you are trapped in a veritable pathological black hole from which you can never escape. I warned Bob Cross (the person ultimately behind that YouTube video) that he was wasting his time and that it would merely attract the usual loonies ... as indeed it did. Why do you question it? Laithwaite was very quick to put his gadget on scales (because he knew it would read false - 'everyone' knows that) but less willing to put himself on scales (because he knew it would reveal his lie).
PS Why do you think that I am a scientist? I never claimed that. Do you always assume that, instead of thinking that certain things might be glaringly obvious to those not blinkered by age-old myth. Yes, 'a spinning top weighs less' nonsense has been around for a long time. It pre-dates the invention of the gyroscope in fact.

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Answer: Gardner Martin - 27/04/2021 00:55:19
 Brown,
no, we do not know anything of the sort: the mathematics of rotational motion have been intensively studied for hundreds of years. Rotating objects are everywhere; if there were any anomalies they would show up during use. Just to be clear: the gyroscope was invented at the beginning of the 19th century. It consists of a spinning wheel supported in two sets of gimbals. It is thus unsuitable for 'schoolboy' tricks. The ancient traditional top is also unsuitable for such tricks; just try putting a spinning peg-top on a little tower. Such tricks are always done using a gyrostat, which is a sort of bastard child of whip-top and gyroscope. You may have heard that your smart-phone contains a gyroscope. Did you wonder how it could possibly fit? Did you wonder if your iPhone weighed less when switched on? Well, it doesn't contain a gyroscope. It contains a vibrating reed which obeys the same mathematical laws as the gyroscope. You all like to accuse scientists of being closed-minded, but those scientists know of anomalies that you would not even dream of. Have you never seen a string of beads levitate out of a beaker? Check YouTube. Did you know that certain objects speed up upon crashing into a barrier? Your problem is that you are hooked on Newtonian thinking, but Newton's laws were predicated upon point-like objects; whence a lot of your problems with the real world.

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Answer: Gardner Martin - 27/04/2021 01:09:12
 Here, I have saved you the trouble:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHsKJJvcFLQ
mathematical physicists know exactly how this happens, and it is entirely in line with Newton's laws, but what hope would shed-dwellers have who cannot even see through the Laithwaite trick?

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Answer: Gardner Martin - 27/04/2021 13:05:24
 I am in fact an historian (of science) who is trying to do for antigravity what Dircks and Ord-Hume did for perpetual motion: that is, expose it. I must say that spinning-top cranks are 'a cut above' when considering all of the reactionless-propulsion patent applications which have been applied for during the past 125 years. There have been nutters who thought that a spaceship could be propelled just by pressing on the hull! The most popular delusion is that centrifugal force is real and that simply spinning an eccentric wheel will propel a spaceship. Another sad class of inventors thinks that propulsion can be achieved by throwing things around within the hull. Those 'things' have been water, steel balls, electrons ... or even photons. The latter 'photon-fools' are the luckiest at the moment* in that the British government and NASA have thrown money at them. I would like to have a book ready to publish when the latter schemes collapse and the 'academics' are shown up to be - in effect - 'white-collar criminals'. Either that, or they really are as bad as the lunatic fringe routinely claims them to be.
* I know of a university lecturer who has given up teaching because he is basking in money from a US government agency. All that he has to do now is to defeat Newton's third law. Will they ask for their money back?

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Answer: Glenn Hawkins - 27/04/2021 16:21:08
 This is my last reply to you.
Gardner Martin:
…the weight acts through the centre-of-gravity … when the wheel is spinning…, the weight acts through his hand. He has only to support the weight; there is no longer any torque. ..”

That is sensually his poorly comprehensible explanation in his words. For fifteen years we here have explained the weight of the gyro is transferred through torque to force down on the pedestal. He adds nothing. He also fails to address my following paragraph, assuming he understood it.

Glenn:
“There is more to it. The wheel arcs upward in a curve inward and upward. When the hand lifts upward at the same speed of the rising gyroscope, the wheel cannot curve inward, only upward. And because of the conservation of energy, the power for the inward arch of the gyroscope is converted fully to the upward lift and so requires less energy from the man. More, the lifting energy is already paid as the man is holding the wheel up. The additional force necessary to lift it higher is only to overcome the inertial resistance of the wheel. It would be about equal to slowly rolling a 40-pound bowling ball across the floor with one finger. The leverage struggle the man experience is because he must straighten his elbows and shoulders. The wheel is never lighter but it is easier to lift.”

I kind of feel sorry for you, to spend one's limited life-hours trying to hurt people and then justifying it as your responsibility, though not one motherfucker in the world is interested.


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Answer: Gardner Martin - 27/04/2021 16:59:57
 Glenn, Oh, I assumed that it was well known that the rising of the wheel is an unavoidable consequence of the conservation laws. This 'hurrying-on of the precession' effect was one of the first phenomena to be remarked upon when, after thousands of years of faffing about, people finally started to play with gyrostats rather than peg-tops and began to understand precession (including things which a lot of shed-dwellers have apparently forgotten). Just to remind you: turning in the other direction makes the wheel sink, and blocking the precession altogether sends the wheel straight down (that is why some idiots think that there is no associated momentum). To go back to the beginning: do you really think that torque itself somehow exerts a force on the platform(?) when the wheel is precessing? That is mental! On that topic, I worry for you: first you invent a 'London Academy of Science' and then you confuse 'sensual' with essential (?). Are you suffering from dementia?

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Answer: Glenn Hawkins - 27/04/2021 17:34:14
 I reply to everyone, not to the pimple.

I have begun to see that Gardner Martin is in fact a crazy person. I am very certain. I encourage all that he be ignored… ostracized into none existence. Let him write to himself. If you message him, he will only insult you. That is his particular malady.


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Answer: Gardner Martin - 28/04/2021 16:00:48
 So you are the spokesperson for a minute pathological group which denies overwhelming experimental and theoretical evidence, cannot understand or misinterprets elementary physical and mechanical principles and ... most importantly ... cannot offer a shred of evidence. You are even playing the game wrongly: look at the late John Searl. He was the criminal offspring of criminal parents and 'dined out' for a lifetime on the lie that he had built a (never seen) levitating perpetual-motion machine. He also had zero evidence, but look at the success that he had. Some NASA employees have even cited him favorably in scientific papers! Is it so insulting to point these things out? Is it any more insulting than the unwarranted insults that you throw at scientists?

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Answer: dave brown - 03/05/2021 06:07:41
 gardner, i grew up with gardners. but you probably would have gone for the shock by using my last name anyways.

i beg of you, or don't... build my simple idea. prove it wrong. would take far less time with a garage to do that than to come up with quick quips.



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Answer: Glenn Hawkins - 16/05/2021 02:16:14
 Gardner Martin to Somebody
30/04/2021 12:29:59

Gardner to Brown: You are “Verbally both incontinent and incoherent. Scientists and mathematicians have understood precession for hundreds of years. Please catch up, or shut up.”

INCOHERENT: specifically means unintelligible. He called you stupid.

INCONTINENT: insufficient voluntary control over urination or defecation.

He’s saying your brain is a dirty diaper, BETTER KNOWN AS SHIT FOR BRAINS.

Now go ahead and stick up for him.


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Answer: dave brown - 18/05/2021 19:45:15
 again i ask that hawkins be banned.

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