NokiMo
veritasium
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Sneak Preview: I'd love to get your thoughts on this one

Does this video make sense? I think it does but I'd love to know your thoughts. What do you like/dislike? Anything unclear? Thanks for being first to watch this and offer your feedback.

Best,

Derek

Sneak Preview: I'd love to get your thoughts on this one

Comments

I definitely looked at the phase space explanation. Hopefully the new version of the video cleared up some confusion. I think the role of the big masses is basically to set up and maintain the centrifugal force field, which they continue to do after the disk is bumped, so it is the small masses existing within this field that are responsible for the flip...

Veritasium

They do stabilize it about one axis (but have no influence over perpendicular motion. What the animation shows better now is that they are more or less unaffected by the rotation of the small masses (this is in the extreme case where the small masses have negligible mass compared to the big masses)

Veritasium

I did not understand why the large masses, experiencing even larger centrifugal forces are not able to stabilize the system similarly to what happens in gyroscopes. Intuitively, I also understand this phenomenon as an elliptic motion in the phase space between 2 unstable attractors.

Dmitry Zinenko

My current internal visualisation of this phenomena is a continuous transfer of angular momentum between the intermediate axis of rotation, and the other axes of rotation - somewhat like doing an elliptical orbit in phase space. I don't really understand the microstate explanation provided in the animation. It seems like not all of the forces are drawn once you bump the circle, so that it seems that the small masses are the only ones responsible for triggering the transition. The large masses should also play a part, right? Would you be able to explain in more detail the forces on each point mass?

Poker Chen

Also extra note: Spinning things may not be your specialty, but it is mine... :D

I have been waiting for the answer to the Intermediate Axis Theorem. However, one question: When the disk with point masses spins along the x-axis so that the small masses are moving, why don't the big point masses experience increasing centrifugal force (like the small masses in the video) and flip to the other side? In other words, why doesn't an object flip when spinning with the least moment of inertia?


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