Video of unbalanced gyroscope precession: AVI, 1280 x 720, 25 fps, 11.9 Mb, codec MPEG-4 v2, 30 seconds
Rotating systems exhibit some behavior that appears strange when we apply our intuition, developed for linear motion. The motion of the gyroscope shown here is an example. The silver colored rotor inside the gimbals rings is spinning rapidly about its axis. As we will see, it is the presence of the little weight, hung on one end of the axis of rotation of the spinning rotor, that causes the