Gravitomagnetism, jets in quasars, and the Stanford Gyroscope Experiment.

William Fairbank is tremendously lucky-or is he clairvoyant? He initiated the Stanford gyroscope experiment in 1961 as a search for the dragging of inertial frames by the earth's rotation-an effect so small as to be interesting in principle, but not in practice. However, today, twenty years later, just when technology development for the gyroscope experiment has reached completion, the theoretical framework for the experiment is changing. Physicists now see the experiment as a search for the gravitational analog of a magnetic field; and astrophysicists now invoke this gravitomagnetic field as a power source and alignment force for recently discovered jets squirting out of quasars and galactic nuclei. Suddenly the gyroscope experiment is a crucial test of the mechanism of the most violent explosions in OW univem. In this paper' I shall not discuss the gyroscope experiment itself; for that see Everitt [l]. Rather, I shall describe the new astrophysical motivations i