Monday, August 29, 2011

Cool - something we don't understand

I got my BS in Physics.  I find it fascinating when scientists come across something they don't understand.

Gyroscope's unexplained acceleration may be due to modified inertia:

When a spinning laser gyroscope is placed near a super-cooled rotating ring, the gyroscope accelerates a bit in the same direction as the ring, and scientists aren’t sure why. The anomalous acceleration was discovered in 2007 by Martin Tajmar at the Space Propulsion group at the Austrian Institute of Technology in Seibersdorf, Austria. So far, the effect has only been observed in this one laboratory. Since then, scientists have been looking for an explanation for the so-called Tajmar effect.

3 comments:

Luke Holzmann said...

...something I don't understand either [smile]. I thought I'd read the rest of the article, but quickly found that most of it was over my head. Fascinating stuff, or so it sounds [smile].

~Luke

Fatcat said...

There's a whole lot more than that I don't understand!!!!

Henry Cate said...

Another one that fascinates me is that the tragectories of spacecraft don't follow exactly our understanding of how they should interact with gravity:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24232/?nlid=2428