SPINNING TOP - credits, sources, and what we could not check ============================================================ WHAT THIS IS ------------ An independent reimplementation, written from scratch in JavaScript and hand-written WebGL2. No code, art, sound, data or assets from any product are used. Nothing here is affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any association, manufacturer or rights holder named below. Beyblade is a trademark of its owner; it is deliberately not referenced, modelled or imitated. THE ORIGINAL ------------ A spinning top has no author, year or publisher. It is one of the oldest toys there is and it belongs to nobody. Three things in this app DO have owners, and they are credited here. 1. THE TIPPE TOP, as a patented object. German patent DE 63261, "Wendekreisel", filed 7 October 1891 by Fraeulein H. Sperl of Muenchen, published 12 July 1892. Read on the primary patent record. The patent already describes an adjustable centre-of-gravity knob - which is the alpha slider on the Bench. Later patents in the same line, also read on the primary record: Lomnitz, DE 613285 (filed 1933, published 1935) and GB 442452 (1934 / 1936) Hummel, DE 811096 (filed 1948, published 1951) and DE 889574 (1949 / 1952) A widely repeated claim that the tippe top was invented by "Werner Oestberg" in 1950s Denmark could NOT be substantiated anywhere. We do not repeat it. German Wikipedia credits the 1950s revival to Hummel instead. The photograph everyone knows - Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr crouched over a tippe top - was taken at the inauguration of the new Institute of Physics at Lund, Sweden, in July 1954 by Erik Gustafson. AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives. It is not reproduced in this app; it is cited because the date, place and people are documented and often got wrong. 2. KOMA TAISEN (コマ大戦) and every rule this app implements. NPO法人全日本製造業コマ大戦協会 - the NPO All-Japan Manufacturing Koma Taisen Association. Rulebook published in Japanese and English at komataisen.com, versioned Ver.1 (2017) through Ver.5 (in force from 15 June 2024). https://www.komataisen.com/規約/ルール/ (Japanese, Ver.5) https://www.komataisen.com/規約/rule-english-ver/ (English, Ver.3) NOTE, and it matters if you quote them: the English page still serves Ver.3, dated 1 January 2019 - two versions behind the Japanese. Where the two differ we follow Ver.5. Rules implemented literally: 3-1 (φ20.000 mm), 3-2 (60 mm), 3-3 (the 20.001 mm ring gauge, stated only on the English page), 3-4 (one hand), 4-2/4-3 (the gyoji's calls 見合って / のこった), 5-1 (out of the dohyo, or stops first; two CONSECUTIVE wins), 5-2 (the CONTACT PATCH must be turning), the illustrated reversal clause, 6-2 (tops that change their spin axis are prohibited - which bans the tippe top), 7-1 (φ250 mm, concave R700 mm, chemical wood) and 8-1 (winner takes the loser's tops), which is announced but not enacted. 3. THE PHYSICS. Jellett's integral, the inversion band and the regularised friction law all come from the tippe-top literature. What we could read, and what we could not, is listed below. SOURCES WE OPENED ----------------- Rutstam, "Study of Equations for Tippe Top and Related Rigid Bodies", SIGMA 8 (2012) 019 - the Jellett invariant in the exact published form, lambda = R(L_z - alpha L_3). Rauch-Wojciechowski and Rutstam - the inversion band 1 - alpha < gamma < 1 + alpha, the threshold |lambda| > sqrt(mgR^3 I3 alpha)(1+alpha)^2 / sqrt(1+alpha-gamma), the attribution of the band to Hugenholtz (1952), the regularised Coulomb law with Lambda = 1 cm/s, and the warning that the tidy "gyroscopic balance" story gives a monotone theta(t) where the real solution oscillates in a nutational belt. Ciocci and Langerock - Jellett stated as "an exact constant of motion for the tippe top whether or not there is slipping", and the same integral in a different notation. Ueda, Sasaki and Watanabe - the same band printed as their "Group II". Kilin and Pivovarova, arXiv:2002.06335 - with a rolling-resistance torque instead, "no inversion is observed", and which first integral survives depends on the friction model. German Wikipedia, "Lagrange-Kreisel" - the sleeping-top condition in the form L^2 > 4 A c0 with c0 = mgs, which rearranges to omega_3^2 > 4 M g l I1 / I3^2. komataisen.com - the rulebook, both languages, and the (now closed) solo spin-time division records: 14 min 55 s, Citizen Watch Manufacturing, Tohoku Kitakami plant, 15 Feb 2015. The Japan Koma-mawashi Association (日本こままわし協会, founded September 2002, inside the Japan Koma Museum, Nagoya) - timing rule (the clock stops when the BODY touches the ground), age divisions, and the records tables: 8 min 49 s for a hand-thrown wooden top, years 4-6, 2013. The International Top Spinners Association - rulebooks, the 40-trick ladder, scoring of 85 technical plus 15 performance, and the sentence that settles the equipment question: "Any spinning top will be permitted, including fixed-tip, bearing-tip and one-way bearing tip, as well as over-sized tops." Their bylaws PDF was downloaded and searched: no equipment, specification, dimension, weight or diameter clause exists. Google Patents' primary records for DE 63261, DE 613285, GB 442452, DE 811096, DE 889574. Wikimedia Commons metadata for the Bohr/Pauli photograph. SOURCES WE COULD NOT OPEN - and this list is part of the work ------------------------------------------------------------- Everything attributed to these is attributed THROUGH a later open paper that quotes them, and is tagged `qualified` in the provenance table for exactly that reason. Moffatt and Shimomura, "Spinning eggs - a paradox resolved", Nature 2002 - auth redirect; the abstract is publisher-elided from the aggregators too. Bou-Rabee, Marsden and Romero, "Tippe top inversion as a dissipation-induced instability" - its advertised open-access PDF returns 403; only the one-line summary was obtainable. Braams (1952) and Hugenholtz (1952), Physica - behind Elsevier. Cohen, "The tippe top revisited", Am. J. Phys. 45, 12-17, DOI 10.1119/1.10926 - behind AIP, along with the whole 1954-56 AJP thread. Or, "The Dynamics of a Tippe Top", SIAM J. Appl. Math. 1994 - behind SIAM. Garcia and Hubbard, "Spin reversal of the rattleback" - behind the Royal Society. Note this paper is about the RATTLEBACK only; it is often miscited as covering the tippe top. Proc. R. Soc. A papers generally - 403. Gould, "The Top" (1973) - not online. All top typology here is therefore second-hand. ta0.com's trick pages - Cloudflare block on curl, 403 on fetch. This was the one lead to a possibly Guinness-certified duration record, and it stayed shut. Guinness World Records' own index is JavaScript-only and serves 404s with HTTP 200; ten record slugs were probed and none resolved. We therefore state NEITHER that a Guinness duration record for a spinning top exists NOR that it does not. The 19th National Beigoma Championship listings - Instagram login shell, Peatix 403. malaysiana.pnm.my and lablaa.org - hosts gone; read through the Wayback Machine where possible. Superconductor / vacuum rotor records - not sourced at all. No figure is quoted. WEB SEARCH WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR THE WHOLE OF BOTH RESEARCH PASSES. Every source above was reached by hand-built URL and link-following. A working search engine would very likely have found more, and would certainly have found it faster. CLAIMS WE CHECKED AND WILL NOT REPEAT ------------------------------------- "A spinning top from Tutankhamun's tomb, 2000 BCE" - arithmetically impossible; Tutankhamun died around 1323 BCE. The claim traces to a museum craft blog and has propagated into English Wikipedia. "Malaysian gasing tournaments have regulated weight classes" - this was OUR OWN working assumption. The state government page that Wikipedia cites for official gasing tournaments publishes a date, a venue, a phone number, and an entry form as a JPEG. No weight class, no diameter, no scoring. "Gasing spin for over five hours" - uncited, and contradicted by the National Library of Malaysia's own "more than one hour". The TOSY 24 h 35 min record - not a Guinness page, a manufacturer's own claim about an LED/battery device, and the source concedes the filming was interrupted. "Cara y cruz is a top game" - it is the Spanish for a coin toss. The game meant is perinola. English Wikipedia's "Pambaram" article is tagged as AI-generated as of March 2026; nothing was taken from it, so the Indian tradition is simply unresearched here. WHAT DIFFERS FROM THE REAL THING -------------------------------- Rounds are capped at 90 seconds. The published Koma Taisen rule has no time limit. There is no referee; rule 5-7's right of complaint has nothing to appeal to. Rule 8-1 (the winner takes the loser's tops) is announced, not enacted. The opponent is a seeded random thrower, not a player. A real top is thrown off a string or flicked between finger and thumb. Here you hold a button. Every top is one uniform density. Real tops are not. Air drag, drilling friction and the top-on-top impact model are RECONSTRUCTED: no source we could open publishes coefficients for any of them, and they are why a bout ends in tens of seconds rather than minutes. The dohyo's curvature is handled by a tangent plane refined once at the contact rather than an exact body-to-dish distance. Measured cost: 4.4e-7 of the energy identity per second. The tippe top shipped here needs a 16 mm stem on a 31 mm ball to land inside the published inversion band. That is longer in proportion than most toys'. Whether a real tippe top escapes this by being a moulded shell, by having a denser stem, or by our uniform-density assumption simply being wrong, we did not resolve. It is stated on the page as an open question, not a finding. LICENCE ------- See LICENSE.txt. The code is original and released as stated there. The rule text quoted from the Koma Taisen Association is quoted for identification and comparison, and remains theirs.