Debunked: Gyro Experiment - Proves Motionless Earth?

And I think the size/weight needed will vary depending on the efficiency of the bearings, and if you do it in a vacuum or not. Bearings can only support so much weight, so there's probably a sweet spot based on your bearings. What bearings will you use?
 
I was thinking about a knife edge bearing system similar to the prop balancer I use, where the shaft rests on two sharp-edge discs that spin. With my props it will show a difference in balance of one small piece of tape only a few inches out from center.
image.jpeg
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hi mike , i'm a sailor, as you are aware we use Gyro compass for our heading! I was just wondering if earth stops rotating apart other calamity sure to follow, would gyro compass still be precessed?
 
Why would it be? Gyroscopes detect angular velocity. Angular velocity is the rate of change of an angle, not a position.
Im about to board a plane having calibrated the gyro in iPhone to horizontal and fly from Boston to Oakland. I expect my level to still show the same relationship to horizontal when i arrive. Why isnt the gyro in my phone reflecting the orientation change for curve? If oriented to the ground surface, either the iphone is tethered to earths core to maintain perpedicular plumb line to ground , or it has some kind of gravity sensor (but that would override calibration making the feature useless, it would have no reason to exist). A calibrated smartphone gyro has no allegiance to gravity or Earths core im pretty sure and as you mention we're discussing angular velocity, so where is the angle for earth curve on my phone gyro after traveling from coast to coast?.
 
Im about to board a plane having calibrated the gyro in iPhone to horizontal and fly from Boston to Oakland. I expect my level to still show the same relationship to horizontal when i arrive. Why isnt the gyro in my phone reflecting the orientation change for curve? If oriented to the ground surface, either the iphone is tethered to earths core to maintain perpedicular plumb line to ground , or it has some kind of gravity sensor (but that would override calibration making the feature useless, it would have no reason to exist). A calibrated smartphone gyro has no allegiance to gravity or Earths core im pretty sure and as you mention we're discussing angular velocity, so where is the angle for earth curve on my phone gyro after traveling from coast to coast?.

The level in your phone does not use the gyros. It uses the accelerometers, aka "gravity sensors" (when there's just one of them).

Calibration is to:

A) account for minor difference in the mounting and electronics of the sensor, and variations from the phone case.
B) to allow relative measurements, for example if you wanted two beams to have the same slope, you would reset the level on one, then adjust the other until the bubble was centered.

Full explanation here:
https://www.metabunk.org/explained-...nd-the-world-accelerometers-are-scales.t8817/
 


Narrator: Bob Knodel (of Globebusters) got his hands on a $20,000 gyroscope...

Bob Knodel: If the Earth is spinning at one rotation every 24 hours, that means every hour it has to turn 15 degrees. In today's 21st century navigation systems they're using what's called a ring laser gyroscope. It's extremely precise. One of the people in the community actually purchased one for $20,000.

N: And so Bob thinks that this $20,000 gyroscope is actually going to shatter the globe model. Little does he know that it's not going to help.

BK: But what we found is, is (sic) that when we turned on that gyroscope we found that we were picking up a drift... a 15 degree per hour drift.

We obviously will (?) not willing to accept that, and so we started to look for ways to disprove that it was actually registering the motion of the Earth. That it was actually registering the motion of the sky.

Nar: Next Bob decides that he's going to encase his gyroscope in a "zero gauss chamber" in order to deflect the "heavenly energies" from affecting the gyroscope, because he cannot accept the fact that the world is actually spinning. When that fails to deflect the heavenly energies he plans on encasing his gyroscope in a bismuth chamber... which will also not deflect the heavenly energies.
Content from External Source
 
Very entertaining. Debunking can be fun! Now I really want the back story on "Patricia".



Narrator: Bob Knodel (of Globebusters) got his hands on a $20,000 gyroscope...

Bob Knodel: If the Earth is spinning at one rotation every 24 hours, that means every hour it has to turn 15 degrees. In today's 21st century navigation systems they're using what's called a ring laser gyroscope. It's extremely precise. One of the people in the community actually purchased one for $20,000.

N: And so Bob thinks that this $20,000 gyroscope is actually going to shatter the globe model. Little does he know that it's not going to help.

BK: But what we found is, is (sic) that when we turned on that gyroscope we found that we were picking up a drift... a 15 degree per hour drift.

We obviously will (?) not willing to accept that, and so we started to look for ways to disprove that it was actually registering the motion of the Earth. That it was actually registering the motion of the sky.

Nar: Next Bob decides that he's going to encase his gyroscope in a "zero gauss chamber" in order to deflect the "heavenly energies" from affecting the gyroscope, because he cannot accept the fact that the world is actually spinning. When that fails to deflect the heavenly energies he plans on encasing his gyroscope in a bismuth chamber... which will also not deflect the heavenly energies.
Content from External Source
 
Some golden footage in that video: 4:00 for Knodel's adventures with gyroscopes, and 9:10 for the priceless moment when Jeran's predictions come true - just not in the way that he wanted. :D
 
weirdly I have just watched the recent Q&A session at last weeks FE conference in Colorado - Knodel and Jerans were on the panel (I had not heard of them before)

"The Flat Earth Q & A Panel session at the 2018 Flat Earth Convention in Denver, Colorado.

The Panel Featured from left to right: Karen B, Rob Skiba, Allegedly Dave, Jeran Campanella, Matt Procella, Dave Weiss, Bob Knodel, Patricia Steere."



Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQIwY2ByE9o

it was interesting for the fact that the MC was clearly irritated by the overly religious leanings of the questions



the gyroscope came up I think (or that may have been on lecture Dmurphy25 gave about "gravity" or what he called "droppity" (which I must admit is quite clever)


"A Presentation given at the 2018 International Flat Earth Convention in Denver, Colorado.

This presentation introduces the concept of "Droppity" as the tendency for an object to fall when we let go of it and focuses on the relationship between Droppity and Gravity, and what Droppity really is."



Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLcgsG1XEic
 
Last edited:
Joël Sommeria writes in Foucault and the rotation of the Earth that Foucault cranked his gyroscope up to 200 revolutions per second (12,000 rpm), and it spun for 10 minutes while he read the precession with a microscope: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631070517301019#br0110
If anyone can find the Comptes Rendus of 1852, pp. 421-427 might have more information.

Here's another youtube video with a toy gyro with too little angular momentum. The Youtuber is also using an airplane heading indicator. Both devices do not show the expected precession.

Source: https://youtu.be/xZkcPfsJc60
 
Update: Youtube just recommended the original video by Rob Durham to me, of which the above is a mirror. Commenters there make the points that
a) the heading indicator seems to have a "latitude nut", used to adjust precession, and
b) the self-assembled gyro may have been balanced in the same way, by trimming excessive hot glue to correct an instability.
 
Three Comptes rendus articles by Foucault of 1851 (pendulum) and 1852 (gyroscope, gyrocompass) are reprinted in https://archive.org/details/surdiverssigness00fouc/page/n6 , unfortunately, they contain no details about his experimental setup except that the gyro allowed 8 to 10 minutes of good observations with the microscope, and that the experiment was repeated on different azimuths. I believe there is another 1852 article by Foucalt in the Comptes, but it escapes me. There is a lot of literature on Leon Foucault on archive.org, unfortunately, most of it is in French.
 
Joël Sommeria writes in Foucault and the rotation of the Earth that Foucault cranked his gyroscope up to 200 revolutions per second (12,000 rpm), and it spun for 10 minutes while he read the precession with a microscope: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631070517301019#br0110
If anyone can find the Comptes Rendus of 1852, pp. 421-427 might have more information.

Here's another youtube video with a toy gyro with too little angular momentum. The Youtuber is also using an airplane heading indicator. Both devices do not show the expected precession.

Source: https://youtu.be/xZkcPfsJc60


Yes, gyroscopes have little weights (often just a nut that can be moved in a bolt stud) which adjusts their rate of drift one way or the other.

Actually, the whole assembly has to be very carefully balanced to even operate for any length of time without too much drift.

But anyway, adding slight weight (or moving a weight farther from center of rotation) the drift can be adjusted negative or positive.

A good gyroscope technician will actually ask the customer the latitude he normally flies at and will pre-set the drift to perfectly counter the earth's rotation component for the pilot's location.

It looks like this gyro was probably adjusted for his location.

By way of explanation of the adjustments, as you can see when he tries to turn the main gear on the bottom it doesn't move but the inner part turns: This is how gyroscopes work: A force on one axis translates to movement on the other axis. This means when he tries to move the outer part of the gimbal, the inner part moves.

Likewise, if the inner part is imbalanced, instead of tipping the inner part of the gymbal, it will cause a constant rotation on the outer part of the gymbal, just like this:
Source: https://youtu.be/8H98BgRzpOM?t=26


As you can see, even though there is significant imbalance on the wheel, as long as the speed is up, it doesn't tip over but instead it turns around at 90 degrees.

This is why an imbalance on the inner part of the gimbal would cause a constant rotational "drift" on the outer (main) part.

By intentionally imbalancing the inner part, a constant rotational drift can be caused which perfectly matches the earth's rotational component at the specified latitude.

I hope all that makes sense.
 
Hey guys, I just completed a test with 3 airplane gyroscopes doing multiple tests - and every one of them agreed that the earth induces a 15 degree per hour rotation when the gyroscope is oriented to be sensitive to the axis of the earth's rotation.
They also all agreed that the sun would rise in the east.
Here's the video:
Source: https://youtu.be/xNYW8JWMVOY
 
Back
Top