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A spinning top, or simply a top, is a toy with a squat body and a sharp point at the bottom, designed to be spun on its vertical axis, balancing on the tip due to the gyroscopic effect. Once set in motion, a top will usually wobble for a few seconds, spin upright for a while, then start to wobble again with increasing amplitude as it loses ...
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The stem may be used as a handle to pick up the top, and is also used to spin the top into motion. When a tippe top is spun at a high angular velocity, its stem slowly tilts downwards more and more until it suddenly lifts the body of the spinning top off the ground, with the stem now pointing downward. Eventually, as the top's spinning rate ...
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The first gyrostat was designed by Lord Kelvin to illustrate the more complicated state of motion of a spinning body when free to wander about on a horizontal plane, like a top spun on the pavement, or a bicycle on the road. [39] Kelvin [40] also made use of gyrostats to develop mechanical theories of the elasticity of matter and of the ether. [41]
A rattleback in action. A rattleback is a semi-ellipsoidal top which will rotate on its axis in a preferred direction. If spun in the opposite direction, it becomes unstable, "rattles" to a stop and reverses its spin to the preferred direction.
In classical mechanics, the rotation of a rigid body such as a spinning top under the influence of gravity is not, in general, an integrable problem.There are however three famous cases that are integrable, the Euler, the Lagrange, and the Kovalevskaya top, which are in fact the only integrable cases when the system is subject to holonomic constraints.
Axial precession is similar to the precession of a spinning top. In both cases, the applied force is due to gravity. For a spinning top, this force tends to be almost parallel to the rotation axis initially and increases as the top slows down. For a gyroscope on a stand it can approach 90 degrees.