Question

Use the concept of conservation of angular momentum to explain the following observations: (you should lean heavily on carefully drawn diagram(s) for these explanations!)

a) You are sitting on a rotating chair. Somebody hands you a spinning bicycle wheel with the axle horizontal. If you tip the wheel to one side, you and the chair start to rotate in one direction. If you tip the wheel to the other side, you and the chair rotate in the other direction.

b) The above spinning wheel has an axle that extends a few centimeters from the wheel. You can hang the spinning wheel from the end of the axle and the wheel will stay upright! What happens to the wheel as it is hanging?

c) A cat is dropped from a safe height (2 meters or so) onto a frying pan . . . which is cold and has a cushion on top of it! Even though the cat is dropped from rest while upside down (with zero angular momentum!!), it is able to spin itself and land on it's own four feet.

d) You are now a professional disc golfer. You throw a disc as shown here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3K53OqEOZg

The disc starts off with the left side tilted down. As it flies, the left side of the disc rotates up and the right side rotates down until the left and right sides are even and the disc is level. (You don't need to explain what happens after the disc reaches level flight. The disc eventually tilts back the other direction, which has to do with the disc slowing down, descending, and the center of pressure shifting among other things)

A hint: the front of the disc is higher than the back of the disc, this causes the center of pressure (what is this?) to be a little behind the center of rotation of the disc, causing a torque. Also, which way is the disc spinning!?

PLEASE INCLUDE DIAGRAMS AND PICTURES PLEASE!!!

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Answer 1