Gyroscopic Precession 

who's here in 2024?

I'm going to be honest, you straight up jump scared me there at the end.

I was stuck with the gyroscopic couple for a day or two, every time I thought I have understood, I would again get confused. But your physical approach made things a lot more transparent to me. Thank you very much, sir.

Coming back to rewatch this years later now that it's my university homework to watch it. I can't believe this was released back in 2012

that ending scared me XD

Can anyone further explain what he is torquing about?

How humbling is the pursuit of knowledge. I came here after a several week long binge of spinning tops, and it took me that long to formulate the question relating to momentum and procession. I am a retired carpenter and the only math I have ever used is Trigonometry for stairs and rafters.

Damn, this video doesn't seem 10 years old at all! Your quality is fantastic nowadays but man, you had it on a next level back then too!

The bit at the end made me jump.

At 1:21 you say that torque is given by: T=F x r, but isn't it T= r x F?? The order matters when it comes to cross product.

Thanks for your explanation, Veritasium!

I have a question that .. If there is a top spinning horizontally anti clockwise. The torque vector will be pointing upwards so ? will it weigh less ? or not ?

The torque vector as described would actually be R cross F, not F cross R. Don't forget this on your exams or you will definitely get the wrong answer!!!

This video is probably the best and simplest way to explain Gyroscopic effect on RU-vid. Good work.

The way you explain things is amazing. Schools around the world should have teachers like you! Thanks for the vid. Great work as always!

Great video. I've been watching this video for the past 8 years !!! The arrow's vectors were amazing to view the actual thing. Thanks Derek. As with everything you do, it's always very well made and full of love and details !! 🏆

Omg the end made me jump! lol.

Wow this was great. Nice, clear explanation with a perfect visual representation of the vectors. This is exactly what I needed.

You cleared my concept in just 8min(actually i had to watch it twice) what i was trying to understand from last one hour. Thank you.

I watched a bunch of videos and checked this concept out in few books too but nothing made sense as much as Derek's video did. World's blessed to have a youtuber like him😊😊

I love science, especially when it is fun (near the end of this video). :D

You blew my sh**t off at the end!!!

If you are more used to using force, mass and velocity, you can integrate the weel as connected rotating masses having the rotational force distributed among them, then you'll see that the masses along the weel will follow curved paths according to the rotating directions

Very nice and informative video. There is a small typo at t=1.14. The torque is not F cross r, but r cross F.

cool

You explained this more clearly than my physics professor... thank you :)

Man physics is truly amazing, really one of the most amazing subjects out there

Amazing! Thanks! I am a PPL(A) student pilot and this video makes understanding gyroscopic precession easy!

Veritasium Actually, Torque=r X F and not F X r. This will change the torque's direction.

Another great physics video from the University of RU-vid. Thanks.

My first real experience with Gyroscopic Precession was in class in the Air Force for Inertial Nav. The Stable Platform held three gyros in three different axises. The platform failed to spin up, to our Instructor had three of us wait five minutes, he'd go get a replacement and we'd move it to the floor. We waited the five minutes, not quite enough, it was still spinning enough that we couldn't control it enough to even come close to getting it on the floor where he wanted it, we had to lean how go guide it and we put it about ten feet away! In practice, out in the field you wait thirty minutes before moving it. Especially out of the front Cockpit of an F-4 Phantom.

I have watched many videos but this explains a lot about the gyroscopes. Thank you

Hey Derek! that was so cool how you broke down the concept into simple easy to understand force vectors. Gyroscopic Precession with the bicycle wheel was something I really struggled to understand in physics class. Just wanted to say I figured out a way to explain the same concept and do the same demo with a fidget spinner on my channel so if you want to learn a little more, feel free to check it out :)

Learning this for my Mechanical Design! Thanks for the input, Derek!

This is legitimately the best veritasium video ever.

Dude this changing of thumnails is really working, im rewatching a LOT of old videos

That's extremely clear and logical for me, make perfect sense! Thank you for dedicate yourself to doing all of the awesome stuff in your channel and applying science in to real world! You are my idol seriously!

Okay, I know this is an "old" video, but I'd really like to see what happens when you have two wheels spinning in opposite directions on the same axle.

3:44 We need that sound in a game when player dies

Amazing stuff. And thanks to RU-vid I can play bits and pieces 20 times until I get it.

Thank you! Much clearer explanation than my physics professor's!

The force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us. It penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.

Watch my series of 3 videos where I explain the simple mechanisms I've discovered that make gyroscopes work, including precession. ru-vid.com/group/PLz4azdHbQ7mnmwAfm1LwwIqcLH9Ax3C5y

Nice video! I was looking for a video explaining the physics behind Ultimate Frisbee throws for a school project. This helped me but I also realized that there aren't any videos scientifically explaining a Frisbee throw. I think you'd be the best option for posting a video on that topic. What's more, most people have thrown a disc at some point in their life. Therefore, people could easily relate to more complex concepts like gyroscopic precession as it's visible in a frisbee throw.

I jumped at the end, haha.

As far as I have read, torque is not force cross radius, it is radius cross force. This cross product thing changes the direction completely so He always told us to be careful

This was mind blowing. Very easy to understand! Thank you

good clear demonstrations and explanations. Now I understand force torque angular momentum and precession. Thank you Sir.

It took me about 2 years to actually get this. Vectors can be confusing.

hahahah nice ending it got me

Wooow I’ve never seen this before. Really cool. Great explanation and demonstration!!

Good video as always!!!

I wanted to see that specific helicopter video by Destin by following the link shown on this video. Disappointingly I ended up on his youtube homepage instead. With hundreds of videos to browse through I soon gave up. Hate it when that happens.

Haha the ending was so silly it made me laugh

Thank you for creating this video, it helped my understanding of the forces involved in the precession of spinning objects. I found your video while looking for a video of someone who has connected two bicycle wheels on one axis, spun them in opposite directions to verify that the angular momentum vectors of each wheel cancel with one another resulting in the absence of the gyroscopic motion. If you are so inclined, I would like to see you do the experiment or link me to a video where the experiment has already been done.

I've loved this channel for a long time but had no use for the information in everyday life (other than going out to apply it). I'm now training to be a pilot and my book didn't have the greatest explanation of this. This example was crystal clear. Thanks!!!

I've always wondered if you used 2 spinning cones to form a hollow wall and pumped water from the narrow end to the wide end, and back again. Would the engy of pumping translate to a force. Sideways or down?

It sounded like he was saying Twerk. Maybe thats where the term came from. Twerking is really just Torquing.

It is nice to see how Force and torque play nicely with the rules of vector

Thank you, that was a very crisp explanation without any fluff.

Gyroscopic procession is where an induced gravity field is rotated out of phase with the atom core center of the planet.

Hi, I would like to know if you had two wheels, counter balancing each other and both spinning in a counter clockwise motion from the center point as the one in your video is doing, would they possibly create less tension on the suspending rope? If force were also applied to the orbits making them spin in a counter clockwise motion (top down) as this one is, would that possibly create a small amount of lift?

Thank you, Veritasium. I legit understood it.

Never understood this phenomenon properly until I watched this video. Thanks😁

3:28 hey vsauce

Now put the mass on the outside of the wheel and see what happens. Where's the angular momentum gone? ...

More mechanical physics videos please. You make more sense then my instructor!

I love smartereveryday. Destins enthusiasm and hunger for knowledge is what drives me to his videos. It's kind of the same for you. Guess I see your channel as kind of Destins younger brother channel. Hope you don't take that as a provocation, because to me it's beautiful science and knowledge!

At 2:59......why does the "torque pushing THAT WAY swing the other Angular Momentum vector THIS WAY"? We can see that happening quite clearly in the video, but please explain WHY that happens?. What would happen if I spun that wheel in the opposite direction...the wheel would now precess in the opposite direction, correct? So clearly the direction of precession has something to do with the direction of the angular momentum of the spinning wheel. We can see from your video that the effect of precession is always to try and align the axis of the angular momentum of the wheel with the axis of torque caused by gravity. Since we are balancing the wheel only on one point, as the axis of angular momentum of the spinning wheel starts to align with torque, the wheel turns and as a result the direction of the gravitational torque also rotates about the vertical. This goes on and on and the wheel then turns and keeps turning like the way it does. But my question is not WHAT happens, but WHY does this happen. thanks.

That ending damn ... I was wearing headphones at its highest volume ... :^)

My AP Physics professor showed us an experiment like this, but his bicycle wheel was filled with cement, so it had more mass (momentum? inertia?). He had us hold it, while on a swivel chair, and sped it up with a drill. We could steer the direction of the chair by tilting the wheel. I didn't understand the maths of it at the time. (I know this is 7 years late, but I just discovered this channel.)

Very clear audio, way better than our recorded lectures here at the University of Illinois.

That last bump made me jump

What I don't understand is at 3:48, i.e., "There's a torque pointing out this way (short purple arrow)" I don't believe that he had introduced or explained this torque. Not to my understanding, anyway.

Got linked to this old video from Dirk from Veristablium. Always a pleasure!

Thank u sir, right now i m studying the gyroscope, and get confused about their direction, but ur video helped me to get out of this confusion

As I understand, the direction of the angular momentum vector was chosen arbitrarily. In other words, we could have made it the left hand rule. It is just a way to describe rotation easily. I feel like this description is trying to say this phenomenon is caused by outward angular momentum, but that's just a concept we invented. To understand the real reason you can think of the top of the wheel as a point. With no spinning, that point will travel outward, pivoting around the string vertically. But this point is moving around the wheel, so the side of the wheel that the top rotates towards gets pushed out. In the same way, the bottom of the wheel is trying to travel inwards, so the other side of the wheel gets pushed inward. So if you think about it, it's just like applying an outward force to the left of the wheel, and an inward force to the right of the wheel, or vise versa. That's what causes the horizontal rotation instead of the vertical rotation.

From my standpoint as a physics student, this explanation is not accurate :/ The right-hand rule for vectors associated with rotation is simply a convention. The convention could just as easily have been a "left hand rule", and with the logic presented in this video, the explanation is no longer consistent (with the logic presented in this video, a left-hand rule would have resulted in the bicycle wheel precessing in the other direction). From my understanding, angular momenta are conceptual one-directional axes that exist in three dimensional space. They do not originate from points in space and go outward from those points; they are axes. With this understanding, the explanation present in this video is incorrect. I appreciate the correction made at 1:11. Angular momentum is a "cross product", and the order of the "multiplication" does indeed matter.

Pretty sure I was able to imagine this in my head decades before learning it is true. Thanks for reminding me!

Watched videos from this channel for entertainment and interest when I was a kid.... Now watching them to clear doubts for my upcoming exams... Studying aerospace engineering (mechanical)

@Veritasium At 1:15 tau=r X F not the opposite as you wrote!!! vectorial product is not commutative!

Hi there, first Of all contrata on The chanell!!! I love it!!!I'm a Airbus captain and I also fly helicopters and I always had a question about precession that nobody that I know can answer me...What is the speed that a disc must be turning to begin having the gyroscopic precession?!?

this is one of the videos of all time

This was a weird episode of On Cinema On Location, but I liked it!

Did he just quadruple Vsauce at the end there?

Okay but why does the torque move that certain way? That first equation didn't talk about how much force is also being applied upward since it's a wheel. It is then defying gravity, right? The downward spin pulls toward earth/gravity source but the upward spin pushes towards the sky. I have a bias against equations because they're not language-friendly, but I think there's some mistake or something missing from this explanation. I get that the spin creates a rotation, but I still feel as if there's no proper understanding as to why it's not bouncing around everywhere. Does the downward and upward pull just... cancel each other out?

Thank you so much. The lecture vids my prof assigned made absolutely no sense because they don't teach visually like this. It makes complete sense now

Brilliant demo and explanation. Viewed that way, it's impossible not to understand gyroscopic behavior.

The thought of this thing ending up on my question paper is giving me anxiety

Does this explain why you are able to balance on a bicycle even though it should fall over since it doesn't have enough wheels to stay up on its own (like a car)?

1:03 - 0:55 There is an example we can do about the rotation of objects where the force trying to rotate the wheel increases the energy stored in the acceleration of an object in the direction of this force

Well explained. Loved that

I didn't understand ANYTHING you said but gotdammit I love it! SCIENCE man! Makes me a lot dumber than I know i am!

Hello to my fellow flight instructors looking for a video that explains precession much better than the mess you just force fed your students!

Thank you for posting this video. Now I understand what my physics book is trying to tell me about precession.

Finally got crystal clear understanding. Thank you.

I dont get how there is a torque to 1 side. the wheel is symmetrical. can someone give me a good explanation? what would have happened if he spun the wheel the other way

Now I'm not even sure Wat torque is!

great video, I love Destin's channel too! :)

I always thought that some force is acting on the wheel in the upward direction due to spinning which balances the gravitational force and restricts the wheel from swinging downwards. You made it really very clear that the angular momentum due to the affect of gravity on the wheel is being used up to move the wheel forward. And due to the conservation of momentum the wheel is not swinging downwards along the string because all the momentum is being used up to move the wheel forward (Actually backward i.e against the direction of the spin).