What is a gyroscope?

A gyroscope is a spinning disk. The most common type of gyroscope is an educational ( toy ) gyroscope. It has a spinning disk, shaft through the disk, some bearings at the end of the shaft and a cage around the disk so you can handle it and put it down without the spinning disk touching the surface. What makes a gyroscope fascinating is the fact it wants to continue facing the same way. If you try to turn it, then the gyroscope causes something called precision. This is a force perpendicular to the force that has been applied to it.

So what does that mean? Well in practice it means you can balance a gyroscope precariously on the end of your finer without it falling off; It all balance itself on a tight string like a tight rope walker and you can do tricks like it precessing around a tower that it is balancing on. If you hold a gyroscope in your hand and move it around, It feels quite strange and counter-intuitive.

Practical uses

There are many practical uses such as for aircraft navigation, rockets, games controllers, VR headsets, sensors in smart phones and crash detection systems in cars. The list is huge. The types of gyroscopes have broadened too. They are no longer just spinning disks either, micro scale vibrating disks can do the same thing and are so small they can be built into computers chips. Fibre optic lasers are super sensitive so used in demanding applications such as military fighter jets. There is even microwave based gyroscope now.