A deeply mysterious object
Invented in the 19th century, the tippe top was popularized in the early 1950s by the Danish engineer Werner Ostberg. He said that the idea had come to him after watching children in the South American jungle play with a gourd whose base had been cut off. A famous photograph shows the celebrated top capturing the attention of physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, both Nobel laureates. In France, following the publication of articles that shrouded it in mystery, it became the subject of a demanding problem in the 1953 agrégation examination in rational mechanics. It took years, and sophisticated mathematical equations, to explain the sequence of motions observed.
Enough to turn you upside down!
