Vibrating Silicon: The Physics of the Coriolis Gyroscope

If you open a map app on your phone and spin around, the digital compass instantly spins with you. Decades ago, detecting this kind of exact 3D rotation required a massive, heavy, mechanical gyroscope made of rapidly spinning brass wheels mounted inside brass gimbals. Today, that entire mechanism has been shrunk down to a speck of silicon no larger than a grain of sand. This textbook explains th...