Coriolis vs Conservation of Angular momentum

[Vessbot]

Originally Posted by MeddlMoe

Congratulations, you have hereby explained how the gyroscopic effect works on a rotor blade.

What is next? There is no such thing as friction, it is just collisions between micro-structures and van der vaals forces dissipating energy.
There is no such thing as the bernoulli effect but air molecules accelerating from high pressure to low pressure following a gradient in collision probability.

I think this is what happens when you have knowledge as a collection of facts, rather than understanding as the inference from particular facts to a general principle, and then application of the general principle to some other particular thing in question.

Everybody knows the common-sense and intuitive behavior of a mass traveling in a straight line, and what happens if you push it in a perpendicular direction when it’s moving slowly vs. at high speed. At high speed, the normal acceleration is still the same (it only depends on the force) but is only deflected a tiny fraction of the angle due to the original velocity component. No problem here.

But when you wrap this big velocity into a circle, and give the brass disk a high quality polish so that it appears still, it engages the part of the brain that intuitively recognizes still objects. This decouples the still-looking gyro experience from the easy and intuitive fast-moving object concept, and some people can’t bridge that gap. So instead of the fast-moving object’s resistance to normal acceleration, the different “rigidity in space” (ooooooohh) label is applied, and is referenced in the brain to some other mysterious behavior.

Same with precession, which is even more mysterious and exotic seeming. I would guess most people don’t understand its nature in a gyro, but do understand the behavior of a blade since it’s kind of a necessity in the helicopter game. But the fancy label that the brass disk’s behavior is filed behind, I think acts as somewhat of a block from examining that behavior in detail, and definitely a block from applying that behavior to a helicopter blade.

When you try to apply the label to the helicopter rotor behavior, they point to the understood behavior as the real one that makes it work, so there’s no room for the other fictitious behavior that has somehow into supposed existence. They can’t see that there is no other behavior, it’s the one they already understand! This is the danger of labels. “It can’t be B because it’s already A,” not seeing that A = B even after asking them what the difference is many times. (Of course you can’t do away with them, because then how could you refer to things? They’re a double-edged tool, and best used wisely.)

Edit: To give credit where it’s due, in the last few posts he did point out some potential differences, but I showed why I don’t think they work out as such.