The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

by Brian Greene

Schiff and Pugh realized that according to Newtonian physics, a spinning gyroscope—a spinning wheel that’s attached to an axis—floating in orbit high above the earth’s surface would point in a fixed and unchanging direction. But, according to general relativity, its axis would rotate ever so slightly because of the earth’s dragging of space. Since the earth’s mass is puny in comparison with the hypothetical hollow sphere used in the Pfister and Braun calculation above, the degree of frame dragging caused by the earth’s rotation is tiny. The detailed calculations showed that if the gyroscope’s spin axis were initially directed toward a chosen reference star, a year later, slowly swirling space would shift the direction of its axis by about a hundred-thousandth of a degree.