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Flat Earth Debate / Gyroscopes make FE impossible
« on: September 24, 2011, 11:34:43 AM »
Gyroscopes demonstrate both the rotation and the shape of the earth.
Free rotating gyroscopes will conserve angular momentum and always point in the same direction. If you spin up a free rotating gyroscope and point it straight up, you can determine that the earth is rotating, and the angle shown below, or the angle between the angular momentum of the earth and the angular momentum of the gyroscope.
If the earth were flat (rotating or non-rotating), a gyroscope pointed up would always point up. However this is not the case. In fact, the angle between the earth's angular momentum vector and the gyroscope's angular momentum vector is the latitude at which the gyroscope is located. This means that the earths surface is tilted by (90-latitude) degrees from the axis of rotation, which can only occur for a round earth.
The angle I'm talking about is Φ in the below diagram if the z axis is the axis of earth's rotation, and the vector shown is the gyroscope's axis of rotation.

Here's one of many experiments that confirms that the gyroscope procession depends on latitude.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921452600007535
And you can't blame the procession on mystically torque from the stars either. There are other ways of detecting small rotations. In particular, the sagnac effect: a laser gets split and one beam goes around a circle and interferes with itself. If the ring is spinning around an axis perpendicular to the plane, the laser will be out of sync with itself upon recombination, which can be interpreted as a certain rotational velocity around the axis perpendicular to the loop.
The equation relating the rotational velocity of the earth, wavelength of laser, area of the loop, and perimeter of the loop can be found on the following page:
http://www.fs.wettzell.de/LKREISEL/G/LaserGyros.html
In the top equation, n dot omega is related to latitude as is shown in the lower equation.
This is from a lab that very accurately measures the rotation of the earth.
Here's some more types of experiments measuring the rotation of the earth using inertial frames:
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v78/i19/p3602_1
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v78/i11/p2046_1
Using the fact that the earth is rotating is also the basis for the gyrocompass:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrocompass
None of this is remotely possible on a flat earth.
Free rotating gyroscopes will conserve angular momentum and always point in the same direction. If you spin up a free rotating gyroscope and point it straight up, you can determine that the earth is rotating, and the angle shown below, or the angle between the angular momentum of the earth and the angular momentum of the gyroscope.
If the earth were flat (rotating or non-rotating), a gyroscope pointed up would always point up. However this is not the case. In fact, the angle between the earth's angular momentum vector and the gyroscope's angular momentum vector is the latitude at which the gyroscope is located. This means that the earths surface is tilted by (90-latitude) degrees from the axis of rotation, which can only occur for a round earth.
The angle I'm talking about is Φ in the below diagram if the z axis is the axis of earth's rotation, and the vector shown is the gyroscope's axis of rotation.

Here's one of many experiments that confirms that the gyroscope procession depends on latitude.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921452600007535
And you can't blame the procession on mystically torque from the stars either. There are other ways of detecting small rotations. In particular, the sagnac effect: a laser gets split and one beam goes around a circle and interferes with itself. If the ring is spinning around an axis perpendicular to the plane, the laser will be out of sync with itself upon recombination, which can be interpreted as a certain rotational velocity around the axis perpendicular to the loop.
The equation relating the rotational velocity of the earth, wavelength of laser, area of the loop, and perimeter of the loop can be found on the following page:
http://www.fs.wettzell.de/LKREISEL/G/LaserGyros.html
In the top equation, n dot omega is related to latitude as is shown in the lower equation.
This is from a lab that very accurately measures the rotation of the earth.
Here's some more types of experiments measuring the rotation of the earth using inertial frames:
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v78/i19/p3602_1
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v78/i11/p2046_1
Using the fact that the earth is rotating is also the basis for the gyrocompass:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrocompass
None of this is remotely possible on a flat earth.