One of the demonstrations made by Laithwaite is a precessing offset wheel on which he hangs an extra mass. Immediately the precession speeds up. Unlike the wheel, that mass does not have spin so you can't invoke a field interaction between its angular momentum and gravity, so what explains the changed precession speed?
Absolutely correct. Which is precisely what I detailed in listing the conformers. This is easy. First keep in mind rotational velocity is different and distinct from precessional velocity. They are two entirely different things that occur simultaneously in opposition to each other and they are inversely proportional. As the rotational speed slows up the precessional speed increases. Now as far as adding the weight this is very easy to explain. By adding the weight we in effect increase the pull of gravity. We increase mg. But the law of conservation of angular momentum (LCOAM) says L stays constant, so using precession=L x mg if we increase mg we necessarily increase the precession speed but also necessarily decrease the angular velocity all while keeping L constant. That's why as a top is about to "die" and stop spinning, i.e., its angular velocity is reaching a minimum while it simultaneously has the precessional velocity reaching a maximum by speeding up. There's a great You Tube video of a metal disc doing this. Also I can visualize a gedanken experiment where I have a spinning top in outer space where gravity is insignificant. Attached to that top is an unspinning mass made of soft iron. The top sits on a permanent magnet so that attraction of the soft iron to the magnet provides the force holding the top to the magnet and also the torque that can topple the top to cause precession. The top will behave as though it were in a gravity environment, the math is the same involving vector multiplication, but where is your interaction with the field?. Smudge
Ok. You've just created a homopolar generator. I think Grumpy has posted somewhere my diagrams on how a HPG works. But you don't even have to go that far. I have contended that gravity is essentially the effects of a magnetic force. What you have described is essentially a GFT up quark. If you want an interaction with the field or its surroundings either tilt the axis or accelerate the top rectilinearly. Again this obeys F=qvXB. Increase v then B and F must also increase. This increase in F , this downward pull on the angular momentum vector is manifest as gravity. This is why any mass when accelerated gains weight. The F component of F=qv x B always increases.
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