I don't understand how this works, any help is appreciated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRPC7a_AcQo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRPC7a_AcQo)
Look closely at the wheel, it's not even spinning.
On the contrary, Professor Laithewaite's demonstrations are quite real and the effect he shows can be shown by anyone with a gyro rotor. The problem is with the interpretation of what he shows.
There are much longer clips from his lectures available; they are worth watching, with a grain of salt of course.
What he is doing is called "forced precession". If a gyro rotor is driven in the precessing direction around the axis of precession faster than its natural rate, the rotor will lift up with seemingly very little effort, even to the completely vertical position. To experience this in a lab system on a tabletop... it will make you believe in antigravity. There are other results of forced precession as well, that will blow your minds, guaranteed.
This is a real effect, not fake, just misinterpreted by Laithewaite and his followers, because it is so very counterintuitive.
The presence of the "closed system" video at the home page of the forum is really disappointing... because that IS fake. This is not.
I always wonder how it is possible that a lot of people have names that reflect their intrest or proffesion.
In this case: Professor Laithwaite
Filed of interest: Anti-gravity
Now listen to that name as you pronounce it: Professor Light weight
;D
This is another one of those scientific tests that shows absolutely nothing.
The first step is to remove the human control input and see if the result is the same as the perceived result.
Quote from: lumen on August 23, 2012, 02:39:29 PM
This is another one of those scientific tests that shows absolutely nothing.
The first step is to remove the human control input and see if the result is the same as the perceived result.
I've done that, and it is. If you take a spinning gyro rotor out on a horizontal shaft, suspended by one end of the shaft, the thing won't drop down, it will stay horizontal and precess, that is it will rotate along a vertical axis through the suspension point. The "nod" will slowly droop as the precession continues and the system loses energy. BUT.... here is the key.... if you drive the system in the precession direction faster than it normally wants to precess.... the rotor will _lift up_ just as Laithewaite shows in the video, with very little driving force in the precessing direction and no upward force needed at all.
SO Laithewaite is doing just what he said: he's pushing it along in the direction it already wants to go-- the precession direction, in a circle around him as the axis. And by doing so the rotor wants to climb up, seemingly on its own.
It is an uncanny and not at all intuitive effect. But it is completely real and happens just as Laithewaite shows, and I can vouch for the fact that it does it just the same without human help.
I do not yet know if the lack of centrifugal force that he claims is true, but the "levitation" caused by forced precession definitely is.
If your interested in this effect I highly recommend getting one of these...
http://www.powerballs.com/ (http://www.powerballs.com/)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP-ydJ4HIoA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP-ydJ4HIoA)
You can actually feel the balance of forces in play with this "little toy" and it is an amazing experience. I wore the bearing out on mine, but I do like to push it to breaking point.
When you get to the limit of force that your arm can control, at maximum RPM for you, it becomes unstable ;) or appears to, it remains stable in it's own rotational space / time but you can no longer contain it... and thus... lose control!
You honestly will not believe what it feels like, which is why I am a proponent of using your physical awareness senses to experience reality in the ultimate quest of answering the question... "Why Am I"... from which everything else follows...
Update...
On impulse I went and grabbed my old powerball from the box in the garage where my subconscious told me it was resting... I powered that bad boy up with a flick of the lace... a resonant wrist working on feedback with the brain processing and it was racing at top speed in seconds... it made a horrendous noise... and woke the baby up! Yep that bearing is shot! and now I got earache too courtesy of the missus for my troubles... *sigh*
Oh well... that powerball with an integral coil and neodymium ball magnet as a frictionless bearing for portable hand held power generation that I thought of years ago will have to wait a while longer...
Quote from: TinselKoala on August 23, 2012, 06:01:14 PM
I've done that, and it is. If you take a spinning gyro rotor out on a horizontal shaft, suspended by one end of the shaft, the thing won't drop down, it will stay horizontal and precess, that is it will rotate along a vertical axis through the suspension point. The "nod" will slowly droop as the precession continues and the system loses energy. BUT.... here is the key.... if you drive the system in the precession direction faster than it normally wants to precess.... the rotor will _lift up_ just as Laithewaite shows in the video, with very little driving force in the precessing direction and no upward force needed at all.
SO Laithewaite is doing just what he said: he's pushing it along in the direction it already wants to go-- the precession direction, in a circle around him as the axis. And by doing so the rotor wants to climb up, seemingly on its own.
It is an uncanny and not at all intuitive effect. But it is completely real and happens just as Laithewaite shows, and I can vouch for the fact that it does it just the same without human help.
I do not yet know if the lack of centrifugal force that he claims is true, but the "levitation" caused by forced precession definitely is.
I am only saying that he is perceiving that there is no weight on the end he is supporting. In fact the rapidly rotating disk only serves to resist angle change and the full weight is translated to the end he is holding.
The precession is caused by gravity trying to change the angle as it's supported only by the shaft end several feet away and he must rotate it in the opposite direction of the normal precession caused by gravity otherwise it would translate to the same direction as gravity and move downward.
In any case, the full weight is translated to the supporting point and the spinning wheel does not float as he indicates but simply applies angular force to the shaft and lifts itself from the end of the shaft he is holding.
Quote from: lumen on August 23, 2012, 07:24:52 PM
I am only saying that he is perceiving that there is no weight on the end he is supporting. In fact the rapidly rotating disk only serves to resist angle change and the full weight is translated to the end he is holding.
Yes, that is right.
Quote
The precession is caused by gravity trying to change the angle as it's supported only by the shaft end several feet away and he must rotate it in the opposite direction of the normal precession caused by gravity otherwise it would translate to the same direction as gravity and move downward.
No, that is not right. He is pushing it _faster_ in the normal precession direction to make it go up, just as he says in the video. If you retard the natural precession it will drop downward. Believe me, this is true. I can't show you the apparatus here, unfortunately, as it belongs to someone else, but it works just as the Professor says.
Quote
In any case, the full weight is translated to the supporting point and the spinning wheel does not float as he indicates but simply applies angular force to the shaft and lifts itself from the end of the shaft he is holding.
The wheel does not float, but it does indeed climb upwards. When you provide an outside force, a small one, pushing in the _same direction_ as the precession, accelerating that motion, the force you are applying is translated through 90 degrees and serves to raise the rotor. When the raised rotor in the test apparatus I have here hits the topmost physical stop, an even more uncanny thing happens: the input force you had to provide in the precessing direction... goes away. The rotor will stay at the top stop as long as the device is precessing ... coasting now ... faster than its natural precessing rate. As the friction in the bearings of the vertical precession axis slow the coasting down to the natural precession rate, then the rotor begins nodding back down, and the precession itself happens at a constant rate. The axis bearings again continue to subtract energy though, so the "nod" increases as the rotor drops, but the rate of precession remains the same, within limits defined by the speed of the rotor and its energy storage in angular momentum.
Really. I'd like to show the apparatus but I just don't have permission to.
I see, the precession is the angle change required to counter the angle force caused by gravity so moving it faster should counter gravity more and raise the wheel.
Now because centrifugal force is indistinguishable from gravity, one should be able to build a wheel with smaller wheels on it's perimeter and rotate it to a point where the centrifugal force is about 100 times gravity. Then the angular precession on the outer wheels could be used to apply a upward force many times that of gravity while another wheel applies the entire weight of the unit onto the first disk and because gravity was the weaker force lift would be generated.
Ok, I get it now.
Yep. There are several ways to get... or think you will get.... antigravity and/or reactionless propulsion out of a precessing gyro system. So far, though, none of them have worked in practice, and some of the claims Laithewaite made over the years, he realized finally were wrong, and he had the guts to retract them publicly. Not all though.
TK:
A long time ago i saw a movie where some guy in a barn had a horizontal shaft with a gyro on each end. It was geared such that, when the shaft was rotated around the vertical shaft, both gyros turned as the horizontal shaft rotated about the vertical axis. At the bottom was an electric motor that was plugged in some where. When the motor turned the vertIcal shaft, both gyros turned and...it raised up in the air like a helicopter. This was not a video, it was some documentary that appeared to be from the 60's somewhere. After seeing this, I always wanted to try to replicate this someday. After reading your explanations...it appears that the device I described would not work.
Bill
(EDIT) I am still not sure how that movie was faked but...i agree that it had to be.
Maybe not, you could be talking about one of Sandy Kidd's demonstrations. Again, not faked, exactly, but not what it seems either.
http://www.gyroscopes.org/propulsion.asp
I seem to remember Tk had a video... something like a motor on a gimbal mounted on a rod of some sort.
Why always up and down and not back and forth?
Which way is the top spinning?
Bill
Quote from: TinselKoala on August 25, 2012, 03:56:19 AM
Maybe not, you could be talking about one of Sandy Kidd's demonstrations. Again, not faked, exactly, but not what it seems either.
http://www.gyroscopes.org/propulsion.asp (http://www.gyroscopes.org/propulsion.asp)
That looks a lot like what I remember. It was a long time ago when I saw the documentary.
Thanks,
Bill
Quote from: Lakes on August 25, 2012, 05:04:45 AM
I seem to remember Tk had a video... something like a motor on a gimbal mounted on a rod of some sort.
Yes, I think you mean the one where I took a powered aircraft gyro in its housing but out of its own gimbals, and mounted it so that it could be driven around an axis at right angles to its rotation axis, but around the same center, with power fed thru sliprings. This was hung out on a pivoted arm/yoke assembly that "gyrated" in interesting ways when the precession motor was turned on. That is also an illustration of forced precession but is more complicated than Laithewaite's simple demonstration of forced precession around the gyro's natural precession axis. I call that demo the "drunken robot".
Quote from: Pirate88179 on August 25, 2012, 02:45:20 PM
That looks a lot like what I remember. It was a long time ago when I saw the documentary.
Thanks,
Bill
You're welcome.
Kidd used a counterbalance system, where most of the weight of his gyro assembly was taken up by a cord running up over a set of pulleys over to a counterbalance weight. So when the gyro system was spinning... or vibrating.... the apparent weight of the system would decrease enough for the counterweight to descend, pulling the gyro system up, looking like it was truly levitating. This isn't a real deception on Sandy's part... he was entirely sincere and worked really hard for many years, and maybe still is. But it is self-deception nevertheless, as a vibrating system would behave the same way without gyros at all, just from getting the vibrations right. As is amply shown by the many Dean Drives, Cox Drives, Tolchin devices and other inertial or propellantless propulsion / antigravity systems out there.
Incidentally, the same sort of counterweight lift system was used by TTBrown in his electric flying saucer demonstrations. The heavy saucer electrodes weren't lifted completely by his field effects or corona winds.... just enough lift was required to allow the counterweight to start descending. The CW is what lifted most of the weight of the apparatus.
Quote from: Pirate88179 on August 25, 2012, 12:45:47 PM
Which way is the top spinning?
Bill
doesn't matter-hint train tracks going north and south has one rail worn more than the other
Talking about precession is the entire solar system precessing or is this just a local phenomenon of the Earth's? I guess we would have to pick a spot on an outer planet and see if this is a peculiar motion of Earth. Acquarius has been dawning for a awhile now and just wondering if the same is true for the rest of the planets. If this is not a local phenomenon but a solar system phenomenon it may explain solar system wide planetary temperature rises as the solar accretion disc takes on a different angle to the interstellar dark energy field. I think most of this dark energy is free proton clouds that the entire galaxy moves relavent to. It could explain Telsa's radiant energy collection and various ionosphereic phenomenon along with Van Allen belts etc. and a high concentration of ionized hydrogen collecting in the northpole regions here on Earth. If the Earth moves relavent to a fixed cloud of proton's and it is negatively charged the only thing shielding us from this onslaught is the magnetosphere. The Earth velocity relavent to space is 600km/sec and the Earth is charged negative so I would imagine once inside the magnetosphere they would be accelerated quite alot and push us towards the Earth.