- #1
kmarinas86
- 979
- 1
A tilted top that would otherwise topple over can somehow not do so if it spins on an axis fast enough, but only if that axis also pivots fast enough circumferentially with respect to a "principal axis". Often conservation of angular momentum is used to predict this. But the rotational pull away from the principal axis caused by the force of gravity on a tilted top must clearly have an opposing torque that is not this gravitational force. The force that keeps the top up must be rotational *toward* the principal axis. No force of nature we presently know about, whether gravitiational, electric, magnetic, or nuclear, seems to possesses any capacity for some innate attraction towards an axis simply by spinning mass in such a manner, though it would appear to me that of all the four just mentioned, only the magnetic, with its inherent or "irreducibly axial" nature, appears to resemble this phenomenon, and especially so because stability of a top requires that the spin of the top and the movement about the principal axis be at least within 90 degrees of alignment, similar to the rotating currents in the loop model for electromagnetism.
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