So I had the hammer thrower, but instead of I want to do a little more. When you do touch a gyrating wheel, a rotating wheel like that, there is an enormous strain in it because you really are touching the individual parts so they are trying to really break the wheel in two. However, if before I touch one of those pellets, as they went around, I had draped very powerful scotch tape on top of them glass scotch tape and it went all the way around we'd have a condition where these balls are touching each other and there is tension tape on top of them. Therefore, if I touch this ball here, the blue one, on top it's going to do this it's against here and its tension across, so that it's simply going to pull like this. And this acts as a fulcrum and lifts on the one behind it, the third ball behind as this one goes down is going to lift the one behind it. We have tension in the system, on top of the system, if I touch this here it will work back all through the whole wheel so it will help the whole wheel to tip a little faster, because not only is the one I'm touching going down but the one behind gets lifted but all around the same axis, going around here. The axis between you and me, because I'm touching it here, and it's going in that plane.

Now, then I'd point out, that instead of putting the tape on the balls I'm going to give the hammer thrower twice as many more balls and have him spin and get him loaded up. Now you'll find that the first set the acceleration was such that they were out horizontally in respect to his waist. And I've given him twice as many, so he gets a layer on top, and a layer on bottom, and they're trying to go horizontal so they press together on the ones that are already there. They'll nest between nest in the valleys of them and grip them very tightly. If I gave them all as they all tried to get into the horizontal plane, so they grip it even tighter, and it begins to act as a unit material, it has the same tension effect as that tape I gave you. So this, then, I was more or less describing what a fly wheel looks like that you have in your gyroscope. But we understand that the very center of that wheel has its individual atoms, and really must be thought of as individual quanta doing just what I said. I've shown you how the quanta due to the friction and the intertensioning. There is the friction of the one ball on top of the other, which would make it do it, we have the mass interattraction of the balls too.

So, you'll now understand that instead of thinking about as a man I want you to think about it as a steel axle perpendicular to the wheel. So I simply will tell you, if I then, if a gyroscopic wheel is moving in gimbals in front of me at high speed, if I touch it you'd probably hurt your finger you take some tiny little metal finger and just touch it here the whole wheel does just what I said. It's going around this way, I touch it right here and it rotates this way. Let me show you it stands in front of me here and there is an axis between you and I, and it rotates on that axis.

Now, instead of touching the wheel, if it were made out of steel, and a steel axle, supposing then instead of my pushing down on the wheel here, I leaned in over the thing and took a hold of the axle took hold of the top of the gimbals where the gyroscope is mounted, and I pulled the top towards me, it would be the same as pushing down here, wouldn't it? It's still rotating in this plane. I've forced it into this plane between you and I, then, there's the circle there. So if I took hold of the top, pulled it towards me, then I would get exactly the same results as if I pushed down here. So you do try that with a gyroscope, so you pull on here and it doesn't yield to you it goes over to your right. Now suddenly, I want you to realize I have brought you clearly thru, so you understand, but people say, that is very perverse! I push on the top of the gyroscope, and instead of its yielding to me and my pushing, it goes to the right or left. It goes into a plane at 90 degrees. This is why "precession" has been considered so difficult to understand, because human beings think it ought to go if I push on it, it ought to yield the way I am pushing it. And the fact is, then, that if I push on it it goes to the right,, and if I push on it harder, it goes faster, and it keeps going to the right as fast. So if I keep pushing on it the whole thing keeps going around in a circle this way. The axle will be going around in a circle at a not in the direction I'm pulling, but in a plane perpendicular to me. If the wheel had originally been going the other way, it would go that way. So long as I push it, it keeps on. If I push it harder, it goes faster, and the minute I stop everything stops. It doesn't have a memory to try to be something else at all so you can understand that.

Now, this is the gyroscope, and I hope I have really introduced to you why you've felt your way through, and I really didn't bring in the paradox of the way you feel until the end so that you really could feel it with me all the way through and everything went on was absolutely normal. It's exactly what your experience will tell you will happen. So I find that the error has been in humanity really thinking 180 degrees. And you say, anybody can throw a straight ball.

Now, what really goes on when you throw a straight ball? The pitcher may get a part of a circle in a wind up like this he just sends them out and he goes over like this. Now the fact is, the pitcher you're looking that way, and you've been throwing balls for an awful long time and you say, "I'm looking that way, therefore, I'm throwing there. You don't. He let's go here, at 90 degrees from the direction in which it's going, and then it goes in that direction. He may go on with this finger to put spin on it, which he does. And he doesn't try to stop himself right away, but the point is that his acceleration is this is this is where he let go. And it goes at 90 degrees.

I want to make that a little clearer. You're playing tennis and you're serving. You throw the ball up here and you hit it at 90 degrees and it goes over there. We've always been operating at 90, and we've absolutely kidded ourselves into thinking that we're throwing the ball out here. We don't throw it out here at all, if we throw it out here it goes into the ground.

Now, this is good fun to catch ourselves in ways where we have been able to deceive ourselves in what it is that we are really doing. "Precession" couldn't be more normal. What's abnormal is that we've kidded ourselves into thinking that we could get 180 degrees. The trouble is, the shooting of a gun. That fools you. That's another kind of acceleration. Your ball is vertical, and you tensed it this way and it went that way.

And just come back again to the rope. Remember, I took a piece of rope and the moment I pulled on the rope the more I pulled on it the tauter it became, which means that while I'm pulling it this way, it is going into compression at 90 degrees from where I'm pulling it. Do you remember that? The other day when I loaded in compression all these rods, already in closest packing. They couldn't go towards each other, so as I loaded them, they all began to cigar. And the bindings I had around went into was offset by this pressure, so my compressioning got a 90 degrees tension, and the tension got compression at 90 degrees. And I gave you the electromagnet, when it approached the copper coil, no electric current at all, but just an electromagnet approaching it, and it induces a current. And the current goes at 90 degrees, and sets up a field that says at 90 degrees, "don't come any further" to this magnet. I stop moving the magnet, and everything stops. "Precession" stops. I start to pull the magnet the other way and in the copper wire becomes another current again, and it sets up a field that tries to pull on it and says don't go away. We find that precession is completely regenerative one brings out the other. So I gave you the dropping the stone in the water, and the wave went out that way. And this way beget that way. And that way beget that way. And that's why your circular wave emanates. Once you begin to get into "precession" you find yourself understanding phenomena that you've seen a stone falling in the water all of your life, and have never really known why the wave does just what it does.

Well, I'm now quite confident that I've taken you into "precession" and given you a very, actually hooked up your own senses with it. There is another phenomena in there which is very important, which is acceleration as also orbital, the precessional effect of the earth on the sun the sun on the earth making us go into orbit around the sun. And then we're doing the same to that moon. And I find, then, that the, it is an amazing matter how Professor Goddard was not understood, and an amazing matter how really beautiful was Goddard's accrediting what Isaac Newton had discovered, which I also went over with you the other day. Every time you half the distance between two masses you increase their interattractiveness four fold. If you double the distance away, you decrease the interattractiveness to one quarter of what it had been. Nobody really paid attention to these kinds of things, in a personal way in terms of their senses. Professor Goddard did, so he said, our earth is already going around the Sun at 60,000 miles an hour, and if we gave some object an acceleration any object on board this planet is going also at 60,000 miles an hour around the sun in company with the earth. So we give any object an additional acceleration over that 60,000 could make it then begin to leave the planet. Then every time it doubles its distance out its going to reduce the tendency to fall back into one quarter of what it was. You wouldn't have to go very far out before you no longer tend to fall in anymore. It would then just stay in its own independent acceleration it's their own orbiting.

So, this is Goddard, and it is a very simple matter.

I find human beings, again, on board of our planet, not tending to we're so tiny, and these total experiences are so big not tending to really get things into scale. But, when we accelerate, and we were first told that the rocketed vehicles had gone into orbit, we thought of them as very far out, because our highest mountain is 5 miles. When we get to our airplanes, many of them are flying at the jets at 40,000, 30,000 feet, and well above a Mount Everest kind of thing. And we get to 50,000 and that's only l0 miles out. And at 50,000 you can't see the plane. That's only 10 miles out and you can't see it. So make it 10 times that or 100 miles, and you just assume that it is fantastically out in the blue that's the way it looks to you and I on our planet. But the fact is that our vehicles begin to go into orbit at 100 miles out. Now the diameter of our earth 8,000 miles, and 100 miles in relation to 8,000 is a very small amount isn't it. You find then, take a thin paper match and glue it onto this globe here, that is 100 miles out from the surface of this globe. In other words, it would seem, look to you, as if it were still in the globe. But, now it's independent. It's in orbit. In other words, you don't have to go very far out in this Universe before you get to beyond what we call this critical proximity and you no longer tend to fall in. Falling in is a very, very rare part of our Universe. It is very seldom that anything gets close enough to fall into anything else. The norm is orbit, and this 180 degree falling is something called critical proximity, when it really becomes part of this mass.