The Bizarre Behavior of Rotating Bodies

Spinning objects have strange instabilities known as The Dzhanibekov Effect or Tennis Racket Theorem - this video offers an intuitive explanation. Part of this video was sponsored by LastPass, click here to find out more: https://ve42.co/LP References: Prof. Terry Tao's Math Overflow Explanation: https://ve42.co/Tao The Twisting Tennis Racket Ashbaugh, M.S., Chicone, C.C. & Cushman, R.H. J Dyn Diff Equat (1991) 3: 67. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01049489 Janibekov’s effect and the laws of mechanics Petrov, A.G. & Volodin, S.E. Dokl. Phys. (2013) 58: 349. https://doi.org/10.1134/S1028335813080041 Tumbling Asteroids Prave et al. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2004.07.021 The Exact Computation of the Free Rigid Body Motion and Its Use in Splitting Methods SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 30(4), 2084–2112 E. Celledoni, F. Fassò, N. Säfström, and A. Zanna https://doi.org/10.1137/070704393 Animations by Ivy Tello and Isaac Frame Special thanks to people who discussed this video with me: Astronaut Don Pettit Henry Reich of MinutePhysics Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown Vert Dider (Russian YouTube channel) Below is a further discussion by Henry Reich that I think helps summarize why axes 1 and 3 are generally stable while axis 2 is not: In general, you might imagine that because the object can rotate in a bunch of different directions, the components of energy and momentum could be free to change while keeping the total momentum constant. However, in the case of axis 1, the kinetic energy is the highest possible for a given angular momentum, and in the case of axis 3, the kinetic energy is the lowest possible for a given angular momentum (which can be easily shown from conservation of energy and momentum equations, and is also fairly intuitive from the fact that kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared, while momentum is proportional to velocity - so in the case of axis 1, the smaller masses will have to be spinning faster for a given momentum, and will thus have mor