Yeah the nearby distribution of matter could be affecting it. That's probably a more elegant solution than spooky action stuff.

I think the hard part of your idea is the adding and releasing of useful energy from the gyro. I think macro scale gyros have done this, but it sounded like you were proposing using an atom as the gyro - you'd have to confine it and then be able to interact with it, which I guess you could do with a magnetic field, but magnetic fields tend to interact with more than you want them to, so it would be tricky. And I think you'd have to assume some ambient level of magnetic interference, since everything with mass is vibrating - so you'd have to store enough energy and convert it efficiently enough to overcome that ambient interference while still being worth it.

For sure, the negativity of an electron cloud has some effect on the nucleus it surrounds. But is it a meaningful effect? Idk. What I know for sure does happen is the relative negativity of two electron clouds changes the density and position of nuclei in a molecule. This is called molecular geometry, and it plays a dominant role in molecular biology - those "s" and "p" configurations which I only vaguely recall. Khan academy teaches it really well, highly recommend. The lesson on aminos to peptides has it. Anyways.. Yeah, the orbital electron model everyone learns in highschool is wrong, and I flat out told my chemistry students back in China that the model I was teaching them was wrong. Their reactions were funny. It's useful, though. Whether electrons actually orbit is unknown, but what we can say is that they are found in "probability clouds" that you can draw like a few balloons sticking out of the nucleus - the balloons show the likelihood of finding the electron in that space, where the center of the balloon is the highest probability. When you draw your molecules, you have to think about how that cloud of negativity will repel other clouds of negativity, which pushes the clouds off to the sides when atoms are together in a molecule. This is fun shit, I might get out my biology book after this... Umm.. I think I was trying to see if your model fits into the bigger model that they usually don't teach us in school. Idk, did it?

The light turning on faster than the speed of light would allow could be because electricity doesn't actually travel the length of the wire. Its more like an abacus - electrons repel electrons, so if you put an electron on one end of the wire, it basically bumps the next electron, which bumps the next, etc. So, it could be (not saying it def is) that the information of doing one bump between electrons happens and is completed in a shorter time than it would take a photon to travel that distance. Just a guess, though.