Department of Energy Argonne National Laboratory Office of Science NEWTON's Homepage NEWTON's Homepage
NEWTON, Ask A Scientist!
NEWTON Home Page NEWTON Teachers Visit Our Archives Ask A Question How To Ask A Question Question of the Week Our Expert Scientists Volunteer at NEWTON! Frequently Asked Questions Referencing NEWTON About NEWTON About Ask A Scientist Education At Argonne Varying Gyroscope Weights 
Name: Unknown
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: Around 1993
Question:
I am not a physicist, please forgive a "left field" question. I recently heard that if you took a simple child gyroscope and spun it in one direction that it would way different than if you spun it in the opposite direction. How can this be? Has anyone ever tried it?


Replies:
There was an article published in Physical Review Letters a few years back in which an extremely careful experiment was performed to determine whether or not the weight of a gyroscope depends on the direction of its spin. The result of that experiment was that the weight does depend on the spin direction, and immediately everybody and their grandmother tried to reproduce

mooney

This stunning and completely unexpected result. Nobody could reproduce it, and I do not think anybody believes the original experiment was correct. The weight difference was extremely small, and I presume the result was came from systematic errors that were not adequately accounted for.

Unknown


Click here to return to the Physics Archives

NEWTON is an electronic community for Science, Math, and Computer Science K-12 Educators, sponsored and operated by Argonne National Laboratory's Educational Programs, Andrew Skipor, Ph.D., Head of Educational Programs.

For assistance with NEWTON contact a System Operator (help@newton.dep.anl.gov), or at Argonne's Educational Programs

NEWTON AND ASK A SCIENTIST
Educational Programs
Building 360
9700 S. Cass Ave.
Argonne, Illinois
60439-4845, USA
Update: June 2012
Weclome To Newton

Argonne National Laboratory