I heard about "laser gyro" used in IRS/inertial reference system on aeroplanes but always wondered how they work. This video is a perfect explanation. Thanks!
The laser gyro system on an airplane work (slightly) differently though, as did the mechanical gyro platforms that were used before. To start with they have to use at least three gyros, not just one (nowadays usually up to 6) and a whole lot of accelerometers which are very important indeed. And of course they do provide more than just a direction, they provide all information about the situation in 3d, as well as navigation and (magnetic) compass direction, the latter derived from deviation tables in the systems memory.
I've actually worked with software that used the optic gyros in aerospace systems and we've wasted a couple of hours trying to figure out how did it work for curiosity sake. This video seems to showcase very intuitively how do they work. I never got to understand them fully until now. PS: it wasn't necessary to understand how it worked to that particular software 😅
@@RobertSzasz now that I think of it you are right. They detect phase and not pulses, but the part that broke my brain was the why one signal goes faster than the other. The visible animation just clicked when I saw the video.
Actually there's a well known flat earther that paid $20k for one and made a video thinking he was going to prove the earth was flat, but ended up finding a 15-degree per hour drift, proving a globe earth. His name is Bob something...
@@zromo8994 Not just that, he repeated the experiment by putting the gyroscope in a zero Gauss chamber because he claimed "Heavenly energies" were disrupting it... the gyroscope just kept on rotating inside the chamber.
Bicycles are actually not significantly stabilized by the gyroscopic effect, there is a nature paper where they built a non-gyro bicycle and it still is stable. Stabilization mostly comes from the steering wheel being front and the back-tire following. ...also wow, the fibre optic gyro is magic.
That’s what I remember reading as well. And agreed, fibre gyro is pure magic… black magic… or maybe quantum but really there isn’t much difference between the two…
Coincidentally, Veritassium (another excellent RU-vid channel) did a video on how bikes work just this week: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9cNmUNHSBac.html
Video: *is about gyroscopes* RU-vid: "Flat earth alert! Flat earth alert!" Good video though, wasn't aware of the need for damping nor did I know of the fibre optic one.
Nice video. I worked on the old Sperry Mk 19 gyrocompass and later the Mk 27 in the US Navy. Lots of little bits to 'apply torques' to them. They also used a speed input from the ship's log to minimize 'steaming error'. But we had to manually set the latitude. I'm sure the modern laser with GPS feed are a lot less prone to failure. Oh, and a 'fun' detail, the Mk 19 could be switched into 'high latitude' mode where it stopped trying to seek north and just acted like a gyroscope. That was a lot trickier to navigate with :)
@@CasualNavigation There's a article out there about when the Nautilus (US nuclear submarine) transited under the ice from Pacific to Atlantic. It discusses their concerns about how they will able to navigate. They knew the magnetic compass would be troublesome since they pass close to the magnetic pole, and that the gyrocompass would not operate as a traditional compass that close to the pole. But they obviously succeeded and the gyro worked better than they anticipated. Doesn't go into a lot of details, but it confirms that navigating near the pole is a bit 'tricky'.
I worked for a few years as a deck officer on container ships and on a few of the older ones that I worked on, we still had to go into the gyro room (or where ever the gyros were physically located) and make sure the speed and latitude dials were in the right settings. Also, when I was working as cadet on the Steamship Maui in 2009, that ship had the gyros right in the chart room and it had those calibration controls right there and also a switch for northern or southern hemisphere. Someone accidentally bumped a book on a shelf into the N/S switch and put both our gyros into southern hemisphere mode and over the course of the afternoon the Captain and Chief Mate were trying to figure out why we were getting such a massive gyro error and why it was steadily increasing. Because I was the cadet, they had me just doing sun azimuth sights like every 15 minutes or something to keep constantly updating the error so we stayed on the correct heading while we all tried to figure out what the hell was going on and eventually, after like 3 hours of this I saw the switch was in Southern Hemisphere mode. We flipped the switch and in like 2 hours everything had resettled and we were back to normal.
It is a very common misconception that the gyroscopic effect keeps a bicycle upright while in motion, but it’s actually the caster angle of the front wheel. If you locked the wheel straight ahead, a bike would fall over almost immediately, no matter how fast it was going. The low mass of the wheels, and they’re slow rate of revolution makes their gyroscopic effect negligible relative to the mass of the bike, especially with a rider.
You can actually make a bicycle with negative caster angle, eliminating that effect, and also counter rotating wheels to eliminate gyroscopic effects, and it will still self-stabilize
In fact one easy way to dispel this with common sense is to think about steering the bike, if the gyroscopic effect is strong enough to keep you upright, it's certainly strong enough to prevent you steering!
Flat-Earth *denial* content, sure! Remember that Netflix doc "Behind the Curve" where they pooled their money to buy exactly such an expensive gyroscope to measure to lack of the Earth's rotation... Only to measure a certain 15 degrees per hour after all. 😝
Careful with the bicycle example, the gyroscopic effet does not grant stability, merely some inertia. In fact, you can replace the wheels with ice skates and it works just fine. The fork angle is also a minor effect that helps, but it is not necessary since you can build a bicycle with a vertical fork and it also works fine. The true modelisation of why 2 wheelers stand upright is actually a feedback of the torso-arms-handlebar system that feeds back a counter-steering correction by the simple act of the rider keeping his torso in apparent vertical position ( apparent because it incorporates tge side acceleration vector when turning). As proof, you cannot turn on a bike by turning the handlebar in the direction you want to go like in a car; you have to lean into the curve to automatically start a counter-steering. My dad spent 40 years of mechanical engineering teaching to model and use this. 😅👍
@@ramblingrob4693 Yes, you lean. Not much, but you lean. On a racing-style bike with a low bottom bracket and/or long pedal cranks, you can easily ground the inside pedal at 15mph if you're not careful.
I'm pretty sure that last part about bikes is wrong. Yes, the wheels technically act like gyroscopes but that's not what keeps the bike upright. The way the wheel is mounted does. Car tires are even deliberately mounted at an angle to make the steering wheel revert back to neutral on its own. If the gyroscopic effect was responsible for the stabilization, it would have to make regular steering incredibly hard. But more importantly, driving straight ahead would still only be a metastable state, it would just take more work to tip it. But bikes are a (relatively) stable system, they can drive downhill on their own without falling over.
Well gyroscopic forces help. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8H98BgRzpOM.html That is also why you can drive a bike without touching the handle. Also what you said about cars isn't true because cars use the forces of the corner you are driving through (centripedal force) to revert the wheel, google it and do your research.
@@florianix8272 that is not why you can ride a bike without touching the handle, see Matthew White's example. Also, the research: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_angle
@@matthewwhite546 amazing timing. Now I can finally just send people a link instead of painstakingly explaining to them that they don't understand gyroscopes for the billionth time
"When something has angular momentum we also say there's a torque present." Um no. that's like saying, "When something has momentum we also say there's a force present." Force is the time rate of change of momentum, and torque is the time rate of change of angular momentum. What you actually described next was the direction the applied torque needed to point to build up the given angular momentum. "The new torque and the gyroscope's original torque..." No.
Yes, there is a big misconception between torque and angular momentum in the video, no one really noticed but it's kind of a shame considering the quality of the rest of the video
The gyro effect on bikes is supposedly overblown, with active countersteering being a more important factor. No knock on your video here, everyone "knows" that bike fact and as far as i can tell everything else here is accurate. Thanks and merry xmas
Yep, bikes are stable because, as you topple to one side, the bike steers that way and moves itself back underneath you. A lot of the other physics material in the video is also inaccurate, unfortunately, as it confuses angular momentum and torque. I'm confident all the shipping-related stuff is right, though -- they guy clearly knows his stuff in that department!
I've commented in like three other places, but props for actually interpreting the science correctly here. Every other comment I saw claimed that gyroscopic inertia on bicycles is a myth, which is annoying because it's blatantly wrong in the opposite direction. Like you've noted, it contributes to how stable the bicycle is by adding rotational inertia to the system.
It's very easy to build a lot of intuition regarding gyros if you spin a ruler round its center, it behaves in much the same way and you can see how each end just wants to continue in a straight line but is brought into a cifcle by the tension in the ruler, and how out of plane torque affects its motion
The odd thing about bicycles, is that when you want to turn, you actually steer the front wheel away from the turn. This causes an instability and allows the bike to fall into the turn, and as it does, it becomes stable again. Amazing, you don't even know you did it.
Unfortunately gyros are a big topic in the flat earth community, even though gyros kill their fairy tale belief, they continue to lie deny and spread misleading information 😔
@@CasualNavigation its the same with sextants, the flat earth leaders are saying sextants only work on a flat earth, and their followers who don't know any better just believe every word and run around spreading the nonsense 😔
A compass will NOT be deflected by ANYTHING metallic, it. To deflect the compass it has to be a MAGNETIC material. Brass, copper or bronze, for example, will NOT deflect a compass needle.
bike actually doesn't fall not because gyroscope effect that defiantly have place but more due to сetrifugal force that appears every time you turn the wheel.
Gyroscopic stabilization has almost no effect on bicycles. Bicycles are stable because of the angle of the axis that steers the wheel with the ground. Falling left will cause you to turn left, making centrifugal force to the right that stops you from falling left, and vice versa.
I really look forward to these videos coming out. This was your usual helpful, informative style but went over my head one too many times I'm afraid. Really tricky to follow this one at times. Thanks for the great work and look forward to the next one.
Thanks Craig. It was fun to experiment with this one, but I do agree the subject was a little trickier than usual. Will be back to "normal" in the next one.
@@sagesefton2228 My guess is that it was made for easy demonstration purposes. I didn't notice at first the note at 3:32. And the vector of force you need to apply to keep axis of a gyro pointing north in reality would just be in the opposite direction. Anyway the principle is the same.
Bicycle wheels as gyroscopes: I just watched a video disproving that. When a bicycle's steering is locked it's impossible to stay upright on it no matter how fast you're going. The reason a moving bicycle can remain upright is because the rider is, consciously or unconsciously, making constant steering corrections in order to keep the bicycle underneath them. The steering is built so that it naturally turns in the direction that it leans. If the steering moves freely the bike will stay upright even without a rider as long as it keeps moving forward. With the steering locked it falls over immediately. There is no gyroscopic effect keeping it up.
No need for a rider, even. A riderless bicycle will roll quite happily down a hill and not fall over until either it slows down enough that steering corrections don't move the centre of gravity far enough or accelerates enough that bumps start taking the front wheel off the ground too much.
One question. I understand the gyro-compass will orient itself with Earth's axis, but how do you know where is south and where north? It could be either way.
@@CasualNavigation So, if I understood correctly, depending on the rotation, clockwise or counter-clockwise, it will always orient itself correctly south-north.
I am a merchant marine officer and wanted to thank you for these great videos. I use them in my drills regularly and the crews are getting interested and curios about further topics. Thank you very much and bon voyage at all times.
Yes, I see the mistake in your animation: the gyroscope goes into Earth (Or maybe the gyroscope is spinning in the wrong direction) *Oh, wait! The mistake in your animation is that the base is missing!*
Nifty ! A trigger for flat erfers ! & yes they actually do walk among us in the 21st century. & NOT only in 3rd world nations, & perhaps by the millions. True story. 👊🐒🤣
Yeah, we're here because there's no curvature or motion. Nasa fakes curvature with fisheyed lenses and the weightlessness of space with harnesses and CGI
@@davidjohnson1463 ONLY when woke becomes entirely indistinguishable from a perpetual false awakening. You exist to let everyone know that you'll be accepting anything but the FACTS. But change nothing my doofus, because somebody has to scrub the 🌎's 💩y 🚽s. .... 👊🐒
@@RobertSzasz actually not if your smart, use 2. One at the bow, one at the stern, and a little math and you get a heading. Longer the ship the more accurate that heading will be, but basically anything over 100ft long will be basically perfectly accurate provided you have good gps units, even poor ones would work on a 300ft+ vessel, you could even throw in a 3rd central unit to ensure precision.
@@cgi2002 a good system *can* do it with a meter or two separation, well behaved receivers that capture carrier phase, and a *bunch* of processing power. But it's not exactly elegant
@@RobertSzasz true but I was thinking about also occasions with rougher weather which can screw with units that close. 100ft gives plenty of margin for error. In ideal conditions with good hardware a meter or 2 will do fine, infact that setup may have been used on one of the boats trying to do an Atlantic crossing, as they are limited for space and accurate location data was vital to them.
Cool, was just wonder if the coriolis effect in water drains could signify towards the equator and perhaps be used as a emergency compass of some kind. Not exactly what I had in mind but pretty cool none the less.
At 1:37 you correctly describe angular momentum, but then at 1:39 you say there is a torque about the spin axis... which is not correct. If the angular momentum is constant, there is no torque being applied about the spin axis. One might assume that you meant to say that a torque must be applied to change to the angular momentum, but that's not at all what you said. Then at 3:29 you refer to the gyroscope's angular momentum as torque, which is simply not true.
I saw a flat Earth video that claimed if the Earth were a spinning ball then gyroscopes should behave in a certain way. He was correct about that at least. I think his mistake was assuming the do not behave that way. I sent him a link to a pilot training video that describes this behavior and what pilots should do to compensate for it. He replied back with the claim that NASA makes them that way. I knew saying "no they don't" wouldn't work, so I suggested he build his own gyroscope to see how it behaves, but I never heard back from him. When you want to believe something badly enough...
Gyroscopes prove the earth is motionless and you should be looking for curvature instead, because you'll find out there isn't any. Only faked curvature with fisheyed lenses and CGI.
@@davidjohnson1463 Actually, you are wrong on both counts. It is simply not true that gyroscopes prove the Earth is motionless. In fact, they prove the Earth is rotating. Also, if the gyroscope is moving relative to the Earth they will also prove the Earth is round. *YOU* should be the one to look into the curve of the Earth, because it *IS* there. It is noticeable and measurable from the ground without special equipment, and it can be easily measured even with the most basic equipment. You don't have to take my word for it. Here is a pilot training video telling student pilots how gyroscopes in airplanes work and how to deal with the "drift" and "wander" that gyroscopes experience because we live on a spinning ball. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Kjfzve6lNWI.html This video proves the surface of the Earth is curved ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Lms7ooUeBBw.html You have either been badly informed, or you are a liar. I have provided links to videos that prove you are wrong, you have only made a baseless assertion. An assertion I happen to know is just not true because I have personally done the experiments. You clearly have not done them yourself, else you would not say that gyroscopes prove the Earth was motionless. This is something someone told you, and you took their word for it. They lied to you.
But that's not the main thing keeping a bike stable. Sure, gyroscopic forces contribute to that, but you mainly keep yourself stable by slightly steering left and right while moving, which has a far greater effect on stability.
You say the gyrocompass points north. Is that accurate, or is it aligned with the north-south axis of the earth? How can we tell which end points north and which points south. And, how about in a ring laser gyroscope?
Your intuition is correct, it aligns with north-south, it doesn't point north. And mechanical gyros tend to be used because they're a lot cheaper, and they work just as well for large ships which is where gyrocompasses.
One question. The geographical north pole is closer to the magnetic south pole right? Otherwise the deflection of the compass changes with the south being the north and the other way round. I am not sure if my question is correct. Feel free to correct me.
Your question doesn't really make sense, but if I understand what you are trying to say, the north pole of a magnet in a compass is attracted to the magnetic south pole of the earth. But as related to magnetism, earth's magnetic poles are backwards meaning north(+) is in the south and south(-) is in the north. Magnetic and geographic poles are not the same on earth, magnet north and south is actually quite a ways away from geographic poles.
This video had an odd feel to it. I think you said "anyway" more times in the first 2 min than I've ever heard you say in all your other videos combined. Ha! It seemed so out of character for you.
I’ll answer that by way of relating a traditional flight instructor’s question for students: Instructor: _”You have several instruments in the cockpit, and several methods available to determine your course…which one should you use?_ Student: _”I don’t know…”_ Instructor: _”All of them.”_ Redundancy is a good thing.
6:55 - that's actually a myth. You can build a bike with a counter-rotating flywheel that cancels the bike's angular momentum, and it will still stay upright. A bicycle can sustain its stability by the gyroscopic effect, but only at extremely high speeds.
Are we absolutely sure the new torque arrow is pointing that way at 3:29? Because you spun the gyro upside down during the transition, should the arrow not point down relative to the screen? Or am I just very drowsy at 3am?
The mistake starting around 3:00 is that the Earth's rotation is the opposite of what it should be. With the north pole pointing towards the viewer, earth rotates anticlockwise in our reality where any point on the surface moves eastward. This results in an inconsistency in the torque in the animation as well, where the right hand rule leads to an inconsistent result. As always, great video! Pointing out that there is a mistake in the animation is a fantastic educational device, come to think of it, and made me pay closer attention.
Little nitpick, but Veritasium recently made a video about thr gyrodscopic effect on a bycycle's stability. It is present. But it's a tiny part of the whole. Bycycles are stable because the ridr is constantly correcting it. Also because the fork has a self stabilizing caster angle.
When drilling long tunnels i.e like the Eurotunnel between Great Britain and France, gyroscopes are used to determine where one is and in which direction ones has to drill to meet the other tunnel face
If you had a very accurate map, and connected some clever mechanical arms to the gyro you would have a mechanical GPS, but its accuracy over time would be based on how much resistance the mechanism makes, the less the better
Wow, that was a very interesting presentation! Thank you, more please. I think I learned something, a very complicated subject is gyro navigation. Too complicated for my small brain. I have experienced the gyro effect, most people have I would think. Anyway, the connection of gyro force to bicycles wheels has led me to a question. Any vehicle with wheels has a contact patch, this contact with the surface on which it travels creates "traction". Traction is an effect created by weight and contact (=friction), the more weight per square inch, the better the traction, the more friction, i.e., less slip (generally). On a bicycle, to change direction one "counter steers", tipping the bike over and then adjusting the steering angle to follow the intended path and maintain balance. Steering or counter steering does two things, one, adjusting the balance of "uprightedness" and two, counter acting, or overcoming the gyro effect. Maybe this isn't a question, maybe this is an argument. The force of traction is much much higher than a gyro force, probably 1000 (10,000?) times as forceful. It is possible to crash a bicycle, if the gyro effect had much (a lot of) force, it would be virtually impossible to crash, or to turn for that matter. I guess what I believe, and I may be wrong, it is not the gyro effect that keeps one upright on a bicycle, it is simply balance, balance that is intentionally and directly controlled only by traction supplied by the contact patch and rider input. Turn the handles the wrong way or wrong amount and down you go. Now if the bicycle was floating in a fluid, like the air, we'd really have something the gyro effect could impart it's force. And a hovering bike would be fantastic, lol. Anyway, thanks for creating this video, keep them coming, I find boats and ship fascinating. Maybe because where I live, water is a solid much too much of the year and virtually impossible to ride a bike in a foot or two of not quite solid snow. Get me outa here (sobbing).
@@kornaros96 no, we like watching you stay deceived. All you had to do was figure out there's no curvature, or movement. But here you still are, arguing with a wall.
@@CasualNavigation yeah I mean, you are actually talking about north pole and how it all work in a *round* environment... That's the opposite of flat earth! What! First the thumbs down now this? YT are you OK?
As the global population keeps increasing, you need a smaller and smaller percentage of the population to belive something crazy for it to be notable. One percent of a hundred people is one kook, one percent of ten million is a hundred thousand strong interest group.
The lack of curvature and movement. The fisheye, CGI, and harness bloopers from nasa. The lying Satanists in charge of the world. The List goes on forever.
6:41 Veritasium disagrees with your claim that gyroscopic forces are what make bikes stable. Start at 6:14 of the following video. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9cNmUNHSBac.html So does Minute Physics.
Bicycles do not work by gyroscopic stabilization. It's not even conservation of angular momentum. It's because they are two cylinders moving in the same direction. If it was gyroscopic stabilization, you would never need training wheels because once in motion, it would be exceptionally difficult to knock it over, and well beyond the flailing of a small child. As many a front tooth can attest, this is not the case.
