Reverse Rotors
Unreasonable Men: Precession, Gyroscopes
and Reverse Rotating Front Rotors
This is a story about a man that not only ponders but, laudably, acts. In 2000 Robert Kasten (then 32 years old) bought a 1996 Honda CBR 600 F3. Having owned dirt bikes as a kid growing up in Fontana California, he found that street riding was quite a bit different than the dirt. A friend following him on his first street ride observed that Robert seemed to be struggling a bit with the handling of the bike and that, perhaps, it was because he was not counter steering the bike.
At first Robert thought his friend was pulling his leg since it is counter intuitive to turn the bars away from the direction in which you want to go and, despite finding that counter steering did, in fact, make his F3 much more manageable, Robert was extremely dissatisfied with the explanation of the functional mechanics of counter steering.
Robert, you see, studied Religion and Philosophy in college. These are not two disciplines of academia where one ventures unless one has retained the insistent curiosity of the five year old that many of us lose to the distractions of the post-industrial society or other struggles of survival. That is the characteristic of asking “Why?” to every question.
Unable to find the answer to counter steering in the ethereal canons of religion and philosophy, Kasten turned to the ultimate discipline of the “Why”: physics.