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Re: more Japanese gyro-dropping

On Sun, 28 Sep 1997 William Beaty <billb@eskimo.com> wrote:

It appears that the negative response to their earlier publication has not
stopped that one Japanese group from continuing to look for unexplained
inertia effects in gyroscopes. See below.

Sent by George S.:

In the London Sunday Telegraph of 21 Sept. 1997, Robert Matthews reports
that a team of Japanese scientists have spun up a gyroscope to 18000 rpm
and dropped it through a distance of 63 inches in vacuo. The time taken
to fall this distance was 1/25000 sec. longer than when the gyroscope was
not spinning, corresponding to a weight reduction of 1 part in 7000. The
effect only occurred when the gyroscope was spinning anticlockwise.

I will share this item with students tonight. First I will read the e-mail
message. Then --> What questions would you ask if the authors were here?

If I had a chance to talk with them I would ask:

1) How many times was the experiment repeated?
2) How reproducible the time difference of 4 microseconds (out of
about 600000) was? Was it (4 +/-1) or (4 +/-0.1)?
3) What kind of preliminary tests were conducted to demonstrate that
systematic errors are negligible? I guess they would say thay did
measure free fall times of ordinary rigid objects and had very good
agreements with predictions (for g at their geographic location).
3) How does the measured time difference depend on the gyroscope's rpm?
4) Was this an accidental discovery? I suspect the answer would be no.
They are probably guided by a theory which claims that G, in the law
of universal gravitation, depends on spinning.

This work was done by Hideo Hayasaka and colleagues at the Faculty
of Engineering, Tohoku University, Japan, together with Matsushita the
Japanese multinational. Their results are reported in the journal
Speculations in Science and Technology.

The first Nobel Prize of the next century? Remember cold fusion!