why or how does gyroscopic precession work?
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Lets imagine a spinning bicycle wheel. Ignore the mass of the hub and spokes. Only the rim and tire have mass here.
Each part of the wheel follows a path around around the hub in a circle. If you apply a sideways force to the wheel at one spot, the direction of motion of that part of the wheel changes, but its displacement has not yet changed (because no time has passed since the force was applied). That part of the wheel hasn’t moved yet, but the direction it is travelling has. As the wheel continues to rotate, this part of the wheel deflects from the path it would have followed had no force been applied, displacing it some distance from where it otherwise would have been during that part of the wheel’s revolution.
By the time the wheel rotates 90 degrees from where the force was applied, the part of the wheel that was acted upon has now displaced some distance from where it would otherwise be.
Now because the wheel is a solid circular ring, the force that was applied to one part of the wheel is effectively mirrored on the other side, but acts in the opposite direction (imagine you tilt a stationary wheel. One side goes up, and the other side goes down). So the deflection caused by changing the momentum of the wheel peaks about 90 degrees from its initiation, then decreases and reaches zero 180 degrees from initiation, then peaks again but in the opposite direction at 270 degrees, before returning to zero after completing a full revolution.
The reason precession causes the spinning wheel to tilt in a different direcrion than a stationary wheen is because the rim now has momentum, which carries the effect the deflection some distance from the initial preturbrance. The effect is always 90 degrees from where the force acts, because 90 drgrees is half way between nodes where the forces act in opposite directions to each other.
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