I was using a concrete diamond cutting cup attached to an angle grinder at work the other day. The disk is heavy-ish (maybe a pound or two). When I turn the power on, it feels as though the thing gains 5 pounds. What is happening?
In: Physics
Another way to think about it is if you think about something traveling on a straight road, like a car. That car has speed, and momentum, and in order to move it off it’s path, you need to apply a force to it.
When you spin something up, especially something which has a good amount of mass, you can think about it like a bunch of cars traveling on a circular road. They all have momentum and when you try to move them off the path they’re already going, you have to apply more force than you would if they were stationary.
To add on to what everybody else is saying about the gyroscopic effect, here is a great video by Vsauce which explains a lot of this in a very intuitive way. Pretty neat!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHGKIzCcVa0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHGKIzCcVa0)
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