# @stem_antics on Instagram

- **Type:** Video
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ2qmnpg2CN
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/67155485-stem-antics-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/0807edac29.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-06-21T16:11:30.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Stem Antics (@stem_antics) — https://gondola.cc/stem_antics

## Caption

A spinning gyroscope and a Tesla coil look like props from different centuries, but put one inside the other’s field and you expose the same physics from two directions: energy locked into a conserved oscillation, fighting to stay that way.

The coil is a dual-resonant air-core transformer. A spark gap dumps a charged primary capacitor into a few-turn primary, ringing at the LC frequency f = 1/(2π√(LC)). The tall secondary is tuned to match, so energy sloshes back and forth and the secondary voltage climbs by roughly the loaded Q factor, Q ≈ (1/R)√(L/C). Hundreds of volts in become hundreds of kilovolts out, terminated in streamers that are the air itself breaking down.

Bring a conductive gyro rotor into that field and three things happen at once:

- The oscillating magnetic flux drives eddy currents in the rotor. They dissipate as I²R heating whether or not the rotor spins.
- Net braking torque only appears if the field is spatially asymmetric across the disc; a perfectly uniform field heats without slowing.
- The rotor becomes a capacitive load on the topload, happy to catch a streamer and route the discharge through its bearings.

Meanwhile the gyroscope ignores all of it. Its angular momentum L = Iω is conserved, so the spin axis holds direction in space. Apply a torque and it precesses at Ω = τ/(Iω) instead of toppling.

That is the quiet symmetry. The coil stores energy in charge swinging between L and C at a resonant frequency. The gyro stores it in mass swinging around an axis. Both resist disturbance, both ring down through their own damping, both trade a small loss term for remarkable stability.

Two machines, one principle: stored motion refuses to be told what to do.

#stemantics #teslacoil #gyroscope #physics #engineering

## Stats

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- **Likes:** 219
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## Tags

engineering, gyroscope, teslacoil, physics, stemantics

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