Have you ever wondered why bullets seem to go so straight? Or why James Bond's gun has helical grooves? Or how does the autopilot of airplanes work? Ok, in FlashForward every plane without conscious pilots crashes after roughly two minutes but, let's face it, pilots are overestimated these days and the autopilot (aka "George") would have stand in just fine. Well, if you haven't guessed so far, let's talk about angular momentum.
Put simply, the angular momentum depends on rotating mass and the distance from its axis, that is, if you start spinning around, you have angular momentum. The thing is that there is a physics law which states that angular momentum tries to conserve itself, and this conservation has almost magical applications. It is the reason why ice skaters spin so fast, the principle of the gyroscope, and the way to have bullets "with autopilot". You can try both the ice skater spin (1:11) and the gyroscope (0:13) in any decent science museum or playground and, hopefully, you'll never experience the spinning bullets. These bullets are forced to have angular momentum (that is, to spin) due to the revolutionary military concept of rifling (2:54) which, by the way, it was perfected during the American Independence War with the Pennsylvania Rifle, but that's another story. Maybe it is better explained with a video or two.
I recommend to click on "magic" link to find out about "Clarke three laws", I'd like to highlight this one:
ReplyDelete"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
Thanks for the clarification! I usually think that most of my links are self-explicative, but that's only because I'm the one who wrote the entry and it's true that other people might not see the relation.
ReplyDeleteBut I would like also to require some minimal analytical effort from my audience, therefore you get the reward of realise the relations, hence more involved in the reading process.