Great Ideas of Classical Physics

Great Ideas of Classical Physics

Part I

Professor Steven Pollock

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©2006 The Teaching Company i

Steven Pollock Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder Steven Pollock is associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He did his undergraduate work at MIT, receiving a B.Sc. in physics in 1982. He holds a master’s and a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University, where he completed a thesis on “Electroweak Interactions in the Nuclear Domain” in 1987. He did postdoctoral research at NIKHEF (the National Institute for Nuclear and High Energy Physics) in Amsterdam from 1988

−

1990 and at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Seattle from 1990

−

1992. He spent a year as senior researcher at NIKHEF in 1993 before moving to Boulder. From 1993

−

2000, Professor Pollock’s research work focused on the intersections of nuclear and particle physics, with special focus on parity violation, neutrino physics, and virtual strangeness content of ordinary matter. Around the time he received tenure at CU Boulder, Professor Pollock began shifting his attention to the newly developing discipline-based research field of physics education research. This field now represents his full-time physics research activities. Professor Pollock was a teaching assistant and tutor for undergraduates throughout his years as both an undergraduate and graduate student. As a college professor, he has taught a wide variety of university courses at all levels, from introductory physics to advanced nuclear and particle physics, including quantum physics (both introductory and senior level) and mathematical physics, with intriguing recent forays into the physics of energy and the environment and the physics of sound and music. Professor Pollock is the author of

Thinkwell’s Physics I

, a CD-based introductory physics “next-generation” multimedia textbook. He became a Pew/Carnegie National Teaching Scholar in 2001 and is currently pursuing classroom research into replication and sustainability of reformed teaching techniques in (very) large lecture introductory courses. Professor Pollock received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1994, the Boulder Faculty Assembly (CU campus-wide) Teaching Excellence Award in 1998, and the Marinus G. Smith Recognition Award in 2006. He has presented both nuclear physics research and his scholarship on teaching at numerous conferences, seminars, and colloquia. He is a member of the American Physical Society, the Forum on Education, and the American Association of Physics Teachers.

Acknowledgments:

Many thanks to David Steussy and Charles (Max) Brown for their assistance in creating ancillary materials for this course!


©2006 The Teaching Company ii

Table of Contents Great Ideas of Classical Physics Part I

Professor Biography

............................................................................................i

Course Scope

.......................................................................................................1

Lecture One

The Great Ideas of Classical Physics.........................3

Lecture Two

Describing Motion—A Break from Aristotle............6

Lecture

Three

Describing Ever More Complex Motion...................9

Lecture Four

Astronomy as a Bridge to Modern Physics.............12

Lecture Five

Isaac Newton—The Dawn of Classical Physics......16

Lecture Six

Newton Quantified—Force and Acceleration.........19

Lecture Seven

Newton and the Connections to Astronomy............22

Lecture Eight

Universal Gravitation..............................................25

Lecture Nine

Newton’s Third Law................................................28

Lecture Ten

Conservation of Momentum....................................32

Lecture Eleven

Beyond Newton—Work and Energy.......................36

Lecture Twelve

Power and the Newtonian Synthesis........................40

Timeline

.............................................................................................................43

Glossary

.............................................................................................................46

Biographical Notes

......................................................................................Part II

Bibliography

................................................................................................Part II


©2006 The Teaching Company 1


Scope:

Physics is the science that tries to understand the deep principles underlying the world we live in. It’s about understanding and describing nature. It’s about

things

, as opposed to biological or even chemical

systems

.

How

do things move?

Why

do they move? How do they

work

? Physicists search for deep patterns, for the fundamental simplicity and unity of measurable phenomena. In this course, we will follow a theme-based, quasi-historical path, highlighting the central concepts, ideas, and discoveries of classical physics.

Classical

here refers to scientific work done up to the start of the 20

th

century, that is, essentially all physics before the quantum theory and relativity. It is the physics of everyday life, the physics of a deterministic “clockwork” universe, with enormous explanatory and predictive power! We will spend a little time getting to know the characters who played key roles, including Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, and others, but the emphasis of the course is on sense-making: What have physicists learned about the world? What are the key underlying laws of nature? What are the primary organizing principles? How can we use these ideas and connect them to our personal experiences? Physics is a broad field of study and can be approached from many angles. We begin with a venerable branch of physics known as

mechanics

, the study of forces, energy, and motion. The word

mechanics

might make one think of car engines, and in some ways, that’s a good metaphor. Engines are complicated, but they are built out of simple and comprehensible parts, each of which serves a simple purpose. When put together, they create a familiar, useful, and understandable (by mechanics!) whole. But

mechanics

in physics is not about cars; it’s the study of how just about anything moves and what makes objects behave as they do when acted on by forces. It’s a study that will help us understand a vast and disparate array of phenomena, from Olympic high divers, to the display of sparks in a firework on the 4

th

of July, to the path of the Moon in the night sky, or the ceaseless bounce and jitter of atoms in a gas. We will focus on the central concepts: What do we know, and how do we know it? We’ll ask where the ideas came from and how we might test them. And, of course, we’ll ask what we can do with this knowledge. Classical mechanics is primarily the physics of Isaac Newton and a host of other brilliant characters who laid the groundwork for understanding the world that is still relevant 400 years after its beginnings. Our goal is to walk away with a sense of the order and coherence, the basic structure and principles of this foundation of physics. Mechanics sits underneath the rest of physics a bit like the foundation of a great cathedral. The second half of the course will add the edifice, structure, and turrets. We will need to understand the ideas behind

electricity

and

magnetism

, forces that dominate our technological world and lead to understanding of the structure of all matter and light. This investigation leads naturally to

optics

, which was unified with electricity and magnetism in a brilliant stroke in the mid-1800s. In this context, we will briefly consider

waves

and the myriad phenomena that become understandable, and intimately related to one another, once we grasp the basic ideas and consequences of vibrations. We will need to learn separately about

heat

and

thermodynamics

, a branch of classical physics that deals with everything from understanding car engines and power supplies to making a perfect cake. This course of study takes us right up to the start of the 20

th

century. One final comment: Mathematics plays a special role in science, one very dear to physicists, but we will not (and need not) focus on math in this course. Although skipping the equations limits, to some extent, the depth to which we can learn physics, the concepts themselves are, by and large, sensible, intuitive, and comprehensible through metaphor, life experience, ordinary logic, and common sense. From time to time, however, we may follow brief mathematical detours to appreciate the power and beauty of more formal or symbolic reasoning!

Notes on Course Materials:

Suggested

readings and computer simulations are listed with each lecture, using the abbreviations noted below.

Essential Computer Simulations (“Sims”):

These are all available at http://phet.colorado.edu and should run on any up-to-date PC or Mac systems.

Essential Reading:

Thinkwell

Professor Pollock’s

Thinkwell Physics I

, www.thinkwell.com. Hewitt Paul G. Hewitt,

Conceptual Physics

, Addison Wesley, 2005. Hobson Art Hobson,

Physics: Concepts and Connections

, Prentice



Hall, 2006. March Robert March,

Physics for Poets

, McGraw-Hill, 2002.

Recommended Reading:

Feynman Feynman, Leighton, and Sands,

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

, Addison Wesley, 1963. Cropper William H. Cropper,

Great Physicists

, Oxford University Press, 2001. Gleick James Gleick,

Isaac Newton

, Vintage, 2003. Lightman Alan Lightman,

Great Ideas in Physics

, McGraw Hill, 2000. Crease Robert P. Crease,

The Prism and the Pendulum

, Random House, 2003. Gonick Larry Gonick and Art Huffman,

The Cartoon Guide to Physics

, Collins, 2005.



Lecture One The Great Ideas of Classical Physics

The important thing is not to stop questioning.

—Albert Einstein

Scope:

Physics is the study of the natural world, an experimental science that lies at the heart of all other sciences. It is an effort to make sense of the world at a fundamental level, to unify and describe observable physical phenomena.

Classical

refers to the pre-20

th

-century developments in physics, a reductionistic, “realist” approach that continues to be one of the most productive and powerful tools in understanding nature. We begin with a broad overview of the domain of classical physics: matter and energy, space and time, particles and waves, and forces and motion. This course will take a “quasi-historical” path, and our themes will focus on such questions as: How do we know? Why does it matter? How does it tie together? How can I make sense of the world?

Outline

I.

What is physics?

A.

Physics is the study of the natural world, the physical world, but it goes beyond a simple description of nature. It is an experimental science that lies at the heart of all other experimental sciences. It is also an attempt to unify, to look for underlying essential principles that explain and predict the behavior of natural phenomena and technology.

1.

Physics is about matter and energy, space and time, particles and waves, and forces and motion. In this course, we will create operational definitions for these terms.

2.

We will distinguish physics from other physical sciences, such as chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy, although naturally, we will see a good deal of overlap.

B.

All science is tied to physics, but physicists tend to focus on the basics, the underlying principles, the “rules of the game,” and the players. It is, in this sense, the “simplest” of the sciences!

1.

In physics, we often idealize or simplify. We talk about

pointlike objects

or

frictionless surfaces

; we might even posit a spherical cow!

2.

These kinds of approximations are starting points, ways to help us understand and build to more complex and realistic situations.

C.

The

great ideas

of physics are the essential, fundamental principles that we will look at throughout this course.

1.

We can’t just list these principles, because in some sense, every idea that we’ll talk about has served as a great idea of physics.

2.

Further, what was a great idea in one period of history may have evolved into other great ideas and lost its original usefulness.

3.

In the end, we’ll discover that the great ideas of physics are the deep ones.

D.

An example of a great idea of physics arose in the 1600s, that is, that the world can be understood through experimentation.

1.

Before this time, people often attempted to understand the world by philosophizing about it, rather than observing or measuring phenomena.

2.

The development of the

experimental method

, or the

scientific method

, changed the nature of investigation of natural phenomena and was one of the first great ideas of physics.

3.

The scientific method, simply put, is as follows: Observe the world, formulate hypotheses, test and refine them, then repeat the cycle, looking for deeper explanations and seeking consequences and links using mathematical tools.

4.

Mathematics is a tool to formalize logical consequences. In a sense, mathematics is about cause and effect, an expression of relationships.

5.

The goal and result of this kind of investigation is to weave a tapestry of consistent, generalized, interconnected knowledge, verified at every step by “asking nature.”



E.

A recurring theme for this course is: How do we know? How did we come to believe this?

II.

What is

classical

physics?

A.

The word

classical

refers to a subset of ways we think about and investigate the natural world, building on the philosophical principles of realism, determinism, and reductionism.

B.

Classical physics refers to ideas developed from slightly before Newton (in the 1600s) to the end of the 19

th

century.

III.

Why should we care about classical physics?

A.

Classical physics touches on every aspect of the world we live in, even the light striking our eyes, the sounds we hear, and the texture of objects in the world.

B.

Classical physics is extraordinarily well established and useful. It plays a role when you turn on the light in your kitchen and cook something in the microwave.

C.

Further, classical physics helps explain and enhance the “magic” behind rainbows and other natural phenomena.

D.

Physics is about sense-making; it’s not just a collection of facts. It’s about finding “a-ha” moments and tying ideas together. We will focus on deep conceptual ideas and their applications throughout this course.

1.

In one sense, you already know physics. You live in the world, and you know how the world works. In this course, you’ll learn to organize your thinking and make connections between ideas that seem disparate but have much in common.

2.

Physics is hard in the sense that we tend to live comfortably with contradictions, inaccuracies, or unhelpful generalizations and “rules” about the world. One of our goals in this course will be to uncover and correct such errors in our thinking.

IV.

Where are we heading in this course?

A.

We will follow a quasi-historical approach, beginning with the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. From there, we will work our way forward in time, following the great discoveries of physics.

B.

We will begin with a branch of classical physics called

mechanics

, the study of force, energy, and motion. This study is foundational to our understanding of other ideas in physics.

C.

We will then build on this foundation as we look at the forces of nature—gravity, friction, electricity, and magnetism. We’ll also investigate the consequences of these forces in such topics as optics and thermodynamics.

D.

The ultimate goals of this course are to spark your curiosity, to help you recognize the connections in physics to your life, and to have you enjoy the process of making sense of the world.

Essential Computer Sim:

Throughout much of this course, I will recommend that you visit the PhET Web site (Physics Education Technology), developed by my education research colleagues at the University of Colorado. The site contains a large (and growing) collection of physics simulations, designed to be playful and of broad use. They teach concepts of physics in a variety of ways, by allowing you to interact, to modify, and to test ideas. Some of these simulations “make the invisible visible,” showing a model to help you make sense of some complex phenomenon. I encourage you to play with these simulations, enjoy them, and see how they tie in to the concepts we discuss in each lecture. For this first lecture, go to phet.colorado.edu and play the game called Estimation. There’s not so much physics (per se) to be learned with this one, but it may give you some potentially useful insights into

scaling laws

and

guesstimation

, both of which will be useful concepts throughout the course.

Essential Reading:

Thinkwell

, “1: Welcome to Physics.” Hewitt, chapter 1. Hobson, chapter 1.1. March, Preface.




Feynman, Leighton, and Sands, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", Addison Wesley, 1963

Note:

I will not explicitly list chapters in the

Feynman Lectures

from this point forward. I recommend them because they are insightful, creative, and classic lectures. They are also darned hard. Although designed for college freshmen, they are at a mathematically (and physically) very sophisticated level, so much so that I cannot comfortably recommend the reading for

everyone

(after the introductory chapters listed above). But if you are able to handle the math and want to push yourself, these lectures are a wonderful introduction to the real

details

of introductory physics. See the bibliography if you want other ideas for going a little further into the material than these lectures, but not as far as Feynman!

Questions to Consider: 1.

How would you define

science

? How about the

scientific method

? Is the scientific method as well-defined and simple as we teach children in elementary school? Is it really

more

than a clear set of steps to follow?

2.

Think of a specific example in your life in which you have believed something, then later changed your mind. What steps were involved in that change; what did it take to make you change your mind?

3.

If you understand the physical origins of a rainbow, does it make the rainbow less beautiful or more beautiful? If you understand something about what a star is, how it is formed, and how it evolves, does that make gazing at the night sky less mysterious and wondrous or more so?

4.

In what ways are biology or chemistry (or your favorite science) based in physics?



Lecture Two Describing Motion—A Break from Aristotle

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

—William Bragg

Scope:

Greek natural philosophers made enormous progress 2000 years ago, indeed foreshadowing many of the great ideas of modern science. But they were missing some essential contemporary ideas, particularly, the nature of the scientific method. This is where we begin—first, with a brief description of some of Aristotle’s ideas about motion and the nature of objects. We then leap ahead to Galileo, who challenged these ideas with one of the simplest yet most profound and beautiful experiments of all time—marbles rolling down an inclined plane! There is much to be learned from such a simple exploration: the role of experiment and measurement, the isolation and control of physical effects, the role of approximation and simplification in science, the need for operational definitions of physical quantities (for example, what we mean by

speed

and its connection to everyday usage), and the role and power of mathematics and abstraction in our understanding of nature.

Outline

I.

Ancient Greek natural philosophy was, in many cases, quite advanced, but it lacked a consistent scientific method.

A.

As we know, Aristotle (384

−

322 B.C.E.) was influential in a number of fields of study, including religion, biology, and physical systems. From a modern standpoint, however, some of Aristotle’s views can seem murky and confusing.

B.

For Aristotle, every physical object has a “natural place.” For example, heavy objects tend toward the ground, and light objects tend to move upward. Heavenly objects are of some other nature entirely.

C.

Part of the problem with these particular ideas of Aristotle’s was that he did not conduct experiments, and he did not carefully define the quantities or attributes he wanted to measure. It is essential to establish operational definitions for such terms as

motion

and

velocity

; operational definitions tell us how these quantities are measured.

D.

Returning to the idea of the natural state of objects, we might ask: What happens if we perturb the natural state? For example, if we push a cart, it will move forward before coming to rest. Aristotle would argue that the cart comes to rest because it’s the nature of a cart to come to rest.

E.

In the very classic physics experiment of dropping a heavy object and a light object at the same time to see which hits the ground first, Aristotle would say that the heavier object would fall to the ground “faster” than the lighter one.

F.

When an object is in motion, Aristotle might ask: What keeps it in motion? This question may seem perfectly reasonable, but in the end, we shall see that it turns out to be an unproductive, even incorrect (or inappropriate) question.

II.

The experiments of Galileo (1564

−

1642) in the late 1500s and early 1600s represent a change in the very nature of scientific investigation, modifying and clarifying ancient ideas.

A.

Although Galileo lived during the Renaissance, a time of radical change, the prevailing attitude was still that the wisdom of the ancients was profound and correct.

B.

Galileo’s insights spanned a broad spectrum of physical questions, including time, motion, astronomy, even relativity.

1.

Galileo recognized the need to make careful measurements and to isolate the phenomenon under study.

2.

In thinking about motion, Galileo realized that the strength of gravity made it difficult to study the idea that heavy objects and light objects fall at different rates. He effectively

weakened

gravity by using the inclined plane to study this specific aspect of nature.



3.

Galileo also knew that in studying motion, measurements of distance and time are essential. He measured time using a number of unique mechanisms, including his own heartbeat, a water clock, and strings laid across his inclined plane to produce musical notes as the marbles rolled down the track.

4.

Thus, Galileo isolated the phenomenon under study, established careful standards for measurement, and ultimately, performed a mathematical analysis of his results.

C.

With Galileo,

kinematics

, the study of moving objects, became established. Keep in mind that Galileo’s work did not explain motion; it simply described it.

III.

Galileo was not, of course, the first person to be suspicious of the idea that heavy objects and light objects fall at different rates. At this point, you, too, may be suspicious of this idea.

A.

A simple experiment, dropping a pen and a piece of paper at the same time, shows that Aristotle’s idea is not as “obvious” as it may seem.

B.

Part of Galileo’s achievement was to see that “complications,” such as air resistance or gravity, need to be eliminated from the experiment and considered separately.

C.

Galileo also realized that standards of measurement were required for distance, time, velocity, and acceleration. Today, we generally use the metric system of measurement in science.

D.

Finally, Galileo used mathematics as a tool to relate measurements of time and distance. His approach made use of geometry and ratios, rather than algebra, but the concept was the same: speed = distance/time.

IV.

Rolling objects down inclined planes leads to several significant new ideas.

A.

For example, Galileo had to take into account the results of rolling objects down planes inclined at different angles. This, in turn, brought in the concept of

limit

to his experiments.

B.

Galileo saw what we now know: All marbles (of different weight) travel down the same plane at the same rate if “complications” are eliminated. This observation enabled him to look at the concept of

speed

.

1.

Galileo carefully defined speed as distance traveled divided by time taken.

2.

This definition enables us to distinguish between

speed

and

acceleration

, which is the rate at which speed changes.

3.

Galileo’s definition of speed is almost second nature to us now. We can easily use the speedometer in a car to predict when we will arrive at a destination.

C.

Obviously, Galileo challenged the Aristotelian status quo, and in the end, his simple experiments yielded significant insights into universal aspects of motion, inertia, and gravity.


Go to http://phet.colorado.edu and play the Maze Game, which introduces the concepts of position, velocity, and acceleration in a kinesthetic sense. The control field is in the bottom right portion of the screen; the object you will manipulate is in the top portion. First, choose what variable you will control with your mouse: position (R), velocity (V), or acceleration (A). You will see an arrow on the screen; place your mouse at the tip of the arrow, and use that to manipulate the small ball to move it to the goal. Try all three controls (R, V, and A), and think about what is different each time, that is, how your mouse manipulates the object in different ways. Which is easiest for you? Why? Can you see the big difference between R (position control) and V (velocity control)? You have to think

very carefully

about what is happening in the acceleration mode—it can be confusing at first. Play with the simulation, and keep in mind that your mouse is not controlling position or velocity; it’s controlling acceleration. If you can make

sense

of this, you will have mastered a very difficult and important physics concept!

Essential Reading:

Thinkwell

, “1: Measuring the World around Us.” Hewitt, start of chapter 2. Hobson, chapters 3.1, 3.2. March, start of chapter 1.


Cropper, chapter 1.



Crease, chapter 2. Gonick, start of chapter 1.


Give three common examples of velocity units that you might be comfortable using or thinking about. Why do we have different units to measure the same thing, anyway?

2.

Following up on the previous question, think about defining standards for measuring things. If you lived in the Middle Ages, how might you go about defining a unit of distance? Of time? Of speed? Be sure to think about such criteria as accessibility (for ease of comparison), invariance (standards that don’t change over time), and reproducibility. Are there other important criteria? Are the three I’ve listed all equally needed or desirable?

3.

Galileo “slowed down” the effect of gravity by rolling marbles down ramps, instead of dropping them straight down. What if, instead, he had dropped them straight down through a jar of molasses? (That would have slowed them down also!) What would Aristotle have to say about that experiment? Would it work just fine and yield many of the same physical and scientific insights, or would it be flawed? Why?

4.

How could you measure a time that is much shorter than a heartbeat (such as the time it takes a fly to flap its wing)? How could you measure a time longer than your lifetime (such as the age of the Sun)? How could you measure a distance shorter than you can focus on (such as the size of the eyeball of that fly)? How could you measure a distance larger than human scale (such as the distance to the Sun)?

5.

What exactly do we mean when we say a marble is “speeding up” as it rolls down a ramp? How would you measure this? (It might help to think about a related question: How does a car’s speedometer work? What is it really measuring?)

6.

Try out the Galilean “ball drop” experiment for yourself. As a first goal, just try to convince yourself that (in the absence of drag) heavy and light objects fall at the same rate. Start with a piece of paper and a book (one that you won’t damage). Does putting the paper under the book teach you something about falling objects? How about putting the paper on top of the book? How about crumpling up the paper?



Lecture Three Describing Ever More Complex Motion

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

—Alfred North Whitehead

Every scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.

—Louis Agassiz

Scope:

Pursuing “marbles running down ramps” is a lovely, deceptively simple exercise, which leads us to insights beyond measurement, into the concepts of, and distinctions between, velocity and acceleration. Acceleration is a particularly subtle idea, but one of the paradigmatic ideas in physics, relating to the concept of

rate of change

of something. We will see how kinematics (the description of motion) allows us to make quantitative predictions about the future (and deductions about the past) and, ultimately, how it guides us toward the idea of inertia and the early classical ideas of the nature and dynamics of motion.

Outline

I.

The results of Galileo’s experiments led to the establishment of basic and productive principles for both science in general and kinematics in particular.

A.

Recall that kinematics is the description of motion. We’ll begin this lecture by trying to define some of the terms we’ve used in talking about kinematics—

speed

,

velocity

, and

acceleration

. We’ll also see that once we understand kinematics, we can begin to make predictions.

B.

Speed

is distance traveled per amount of time taken.

1.

Average speed is

distance divided by time

, using any length of time chosen. The average speed is what you care about if you’re driving to a destination and you want to know overall time and distance.

2.

Think of what

60 miles per hour

means. It’s also 1 mile per minute, or 88 feet per second, or 27 meters per second.

3.

If you’re traveling at a steady 60 miles per hour, you know exactly where you will be in 2 hours. This is how kinematics allows us to predict the future.

4.

Distance divided by time is a ratio—don’t think of it as a formula into which we plug numbers. This ratio is what

speed

is.

C.

What is

instantaneous speed

, and how is it measured?

1.

Instantaneous speed is how fast you’re traveling right now. It’s what the police officer cares about when he gives you a ticket. If you say, “But, officer, my average speed for this trip was well below the speed limit,” you’ll still get a ticket.

2.

Average speed

is relatively easy to define operationally, but

instantaneous speed

is a bit trickier. It implies a limit of averaging speed over an arbitrarily short time interval.

3.

A car speedometer computes average speed over such a short time (one wheel revolution) that it might as well be instantaneous.

D.

Acceleration

involves the rate of change of speed. How rapidly is your speed increasing?

1.

Think of the difference between a sports car and an old microbus, each trying to get onto a highway at 60 miles per hour. The sports car takes 3 seconds to reach highway speed, but the microbus takes 60 seconds.

2.

The distinction between

speed

and

rate of change of speed

is subtle but critically important.

3.

When you stop your car, the change of speed may be the same, but the rate of change makes all the difference in the world.

4.

Acceleration is measured with curious units, for instance,

miles per hour per second

. In the sports car, our speed changed from 0 to 60 (a change in speed of 60 miles per hour), and it took the car 3 seconds to make that change. Thus, the rate of acceleration is 20 miles per hour per second (60

÷

3).



5.

If I’m riding a motorcycle and I say, “My motorcycle has a huge acceleration right now,” you can’t tell me whether I’m going fast or slow.

6.

If I’m on a bicycle, traveling at 20 miles per hour, I may touch my brakes gently and cruise to a stop in 20 seconds. Alternatively, if I run into a parked car, my speed will change from 20 miles per hour to 0 in a millisecond. In that case, my rate of acceleration is 20,000

−

miles per hour per second (2011,000 of a second

−

).

E.

The Aristotelian language (

fast

or

slow

) is inadequate to correctly describe marbles on a ramp. Galileo observed that all marbles accelerate at the same rate.

1.

The speed gets faster and faster, but the acceleration is constant, given a particular incline.

2.

The acceleration will be higher if the ramp is steeper. We don’t ask: How fast? or What’s the speed for a given ramp angle? Instead, we ask: What’s the rate of change of speed for a given ramp angle?

F.

Language matters, and physicists use English-language words, such as

velocity

,

speed

, or

acceleration

, with care and precision.

1.

The concept (and mathematics) of acceleration allows us to make quantitative predictions (before or after an event) of speed at various times, without having to directly observe the event.

2.

The police are very good at using kinematics to make quantitative predictions, such as how fast a car was going

before

an accident.

II.

What happens when we add an up ramp on the other side of the down ramp in the marble experiment? How high will the marble reach on the up ramp?

A.

The marble will reach almost the same height at which it started. In fact, in this experiment, the details are not important, and in particular, the angles don’t have to be the same. If the uphill is shallower, the marble will travel much farther, slowing down with a smaller acceleration but ultimately still reaching the original height.

B.

With this experiment, we seem to be onto something a little deeper than just a description of motion.

C.

Now consider the thought experiment of a perfectly flat “uphill.”

1.

The marble will roll forever, "trying" to reach its original height.

2.

Only friction slows the marble down, but left to its own devices, the marble would continue to move in a straight line forever, at constant velocity.

III.

The

principle of inertia

moves us beyond simple kinematics, to a broader concept of the nature of motion. This is the start of

dynamics

, the

explanation

of motion.

A.

The principle of inertia states that an object in motion will remain in motion in the absence of forces.

B.

Aristotle had no clear sense of this idea; his conceptions were contradictory to it.

1.

Aristotle’s ideas about kinematics were not subject to experimental verification.

2.

Galileo is hinting that motion of all objects may be seen as universal, simple, regular, and predictable.

3.

He recognizes that you don’t need to continually push an object; an object in motion will naturally continue in motion.

C.

The ideas arising from marbles might be extended to other situations, including those involving baseballs, rocket ships, even planets orbiting the Sun. One need no longer invoke mystical reasons for why planets continue in their orbits; the inertia principle changes the story by changing the question.

IV.

Before we close this lecture, let’s briefly distinguish between the terms

speed

and

velocity

.

A.

In everyday use, the two terms are synonymous.

B.

In physics,

velocity

involves not just the speed but the direction of motion, as well.

C.

Galileo’s principle of inertia says that any object in motion, absent other forces, will have a constant velocity, that is, the same speed and direction, forever.

D.

This point is critical in understanding circular motion, as we will see in future lectures.




Go to http://phet.colorado.edu, and play with the Moving Man (and, optionally, Vector Addition.) The Moving Man lets you further explore the ideas of position, velocity, and acceleration. Here, you move the character, and you see graphical representations of these three quantities. Drag the Moving Man, and look first at the position graph alone. Try to make sense of the visual representation. This one should be the most direct and the easiest to visualize. Next, focus on the velocity graph. Can you see the connection between the graph and the Moving Man’s motion? The toughest idea is acceleration, as usual. Try this: Instead of dragging the man, you can also drag the sliders on the left side of the graphs; that is, you can set the position, velocity, and acceleration, then let the man go. What happens if you start off with a positive acceleration and let the man go from a state of rest? What if he starts with a negative (leftward) velocity but a positive acceleration? Play around! Once again, the idea of acceleration is subtle but important. If you can set the dials and

predict

what the qualitative motion will look like, you’re making great progress in making sense of this idea. The Vector Addition sim is for those who are interested in going a little further into the mathematics and representations of physics. Vectors represent many physical quantities, including velocity, force, momentum, and others. We will talk about “adding” vectors in this course, and this sim allows you to see, graphically, how one goes about doing that. It’s not nearly so critical to understand, but if you make sense of this, some of the deeper consequences of Newton’s laws will be easier to grasp in later lectures.

Essential Reading:

Thinkwell

, “1: The Basics of Vectors” and “2: Investigating 1-Dimensional Motion.” Hewitt, rest of chapter 2. Hobson, rest of chapter 3. March, rest of chapter 1.


Crease, chapter 3. Gonick, rest of chapter 1.


Velocity and acceleration are different things. Think of an example of an object with non-zero velocity but zero acceleration at the same moment. What about an object with zero velocity but non-zero acceleration at the same moment?

2.

What is the difference between the Aristotelian and Galilean views of the “natural state of motion” of objects?

3.

How does the English-language use of the term

inertia

(relating to human sluggishness) connect to the physics use of this term?

4.

Galileo observed that the acceleration due to gravity is a constant, irrespective of mass. Does acceleration of any object rolling down a ramp have to be a constant in all circumstances? (What role does friction play?) Moving beyond marbles on ramps, what are some examples of objects that do not have a constant acceleration?

5.

Why does a marble in a toy wagon appear to roll

backwards

when you give the wagon a sharp pull forwards? Is it, in fact, rolling backwards? (With respect to what?) Try it, watch carefully!

6.

Think about making the Galilean ball drop more quantitatively. What measurements could you make (in the real world, such as in your living room!) that would convince you that dropped objects are falling “faster and faster,” yet the rate of acceleration is constant? Hint: If you carefully time the fall from different heights, do you expect the total time to be proportional to the height? That is, if you double the height, do you double the time? (Answer: No, that’s what you would expect if objects fall with constant speed, not constant acceleration.)



Lecture Four Astronomy as a Bridge to Modern Physics

I’ve studied all available charts of the planets and stars and none of them match the others. There are just as many measurements and methods as there are astronomers and all of them disagree. What’s needed is a long term project with the aim of mapping the heavens conducted from a single location over a period of several years.

—Tycho Brahe, 1563 (age 17).

He was a scholar of Polish birth, who stopped the Sun and moved the Earth.

—Polish adage regarding Copernicus

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

—Mark Russell (political satirist)

Scope:

The roots of physics and astronomy are closely tied. Questions of our place in the universe, the nature of planets, and the structure of the solar system were at the heart of the development of classical physics. Some ancient Greek philosophers argued for Sun-centered, round-Earth solar systems, but ultimately, the Aristotelian worldview, backed by the detailed model of Ptolemy, settled in and reigned. Copernicus re- proposed a heliocentric worldview, and the detailed data of Tycho Brahe, analyzed by Johannes Kepler, refined and improved that cosmology to something close to what we understand today. The attempts to make sense of these results, fitting together with the ideas of Galileo, ultimately led to Isaac Newton’s articulation of the “laws of nature,” which define the heart of classical physics.

Outline

I.

Galileo’s experiments occurred in a rich context; the world was changing in all fields—philosophy, politics, art—not just science. Our place in the universe was a big question of the day.

A.

Cosmology (the structure and origins of the universe) is a primal issue and central to the development of science.

B.

Every culture develops its own cosmology. People seek to explain the phenomena they see in the world around them.

C.

Today, astronomy is very much its own science, but in the time of Copernicus and Galileo, astronomy and physics were intimately coupled. Astronomy was also an early driving force for data collection.

D.

Greek natural philosophers had made great progress in the big questions of astronomy.

1.

What is the structure of our solar system?

2.

Is the Earth round or flat? The answer to this question was known (quantitatively) a long time before Columbus. Ask yourself: How would you decide such a thing? How could you determine the size of the Earth (with 2000-year-old technology, at that)?

3.

Is the Earth at the center of the solar system? Aristarchus (310

−

230 B.C.E.), a Greek mathematician and astronomer, postulated that the solar system was heliocentric.

4.

The answers to these questions are “obvious” to the casual observer (who is often wrong!). It is far from obvious that we are rushing through space or spinning. (Do you feel dizzy all the time?)

E.

Ptolemy (c. 85–165) created a model that quantitatively explains and predicts astronomical phenomena.

1.

A model is a representation of the world. It can be physical or mathematical, concrete or abstract. Models are a fundamental ingredient in physics; they are the ways in which we think about the world.

2.

Models, by necessity, miss features; they are simplified representations, and they may or may not be considered “real.” They provide a way of thinking about, understanding, and predicting the behavior of more complex systems in the real world.

3.

Ptolemy’s astronomical model involved imaginary spheres circling the Earth. In this model, the Sun and Moon circle the Earth directly.



4.

The planets travel in circles around circles in orbits called

epicycles

. As time went by, Ptolemy’s model grew more complex to match improved observational data.

5.

This model was successful and compelling, despite the complexity of epicycles and imaginary spheres. It survived for 1000 years.

II.

Copernicus (1473

−

1543) questioned the Ptolemaic model, leading to one of the first great scientific revolutions in history.

A.

Copernicus’s heliocentric model was simpler, in fact, too simple. He still subscribed to ancient wisdom, for example, the notion that astronomical objects are ideal and, hence, must follow perfectly circular paths.

B.

Copernicus did not publish his work,

De revolutionibus

,

until late in his life, in 1543, partly for fear of political and religious consequences.

C.

The

Copernican revolution

was neither complete nor immediate, but Copernicus deeply influenced Galileo, whose astronomical observations led him to argue strongly for the heliocentric model, helping overturn long and deeply held traditions.

1.

Galileo’s observations with the telescope revealed, for example, that Jupiter hosted a “mini” lunar system, similar to the larger solar system. This was a powerful challenge to the idea that the Earth was at the center of the solar system.

2.

Galileo also observed spots on the Sun and shadows on the Moon, leading to the heretical idea that the celestial bodies were not perfect.

III.

Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler collected and analyzed astronomical data with unprecedented accuracy at the turn of the 17

th

century.

A.

Tycho Brahe (1546

−

1601) was perhaps the first contemporary experimental astrophysicist; his work was complete with government-sponsored big science facilities and lasted over a period of 20 years in the late 1500s. His assistants made meticulous astronomical measurements using handheld devices.

B.

Brahe had his own hybrid cosmology that would preserve significant Church beliefs. According to his model, the planets orbit the Sun, but the Sun and all the planets also orbit the Earth.

C.

Johannes Kepler (1571

−

1630) was hired by Brahe in 1600; his mandate was to show that the data agreed with Brahe’s model, but instead, he recognized that a much clearer description of the data was possible if Brahe’s hypothesis was modified.

1.

Kepler’s work is more “scientific” (by modern standards) than that of Copernicus.

2.

Kepler’s first law of planetary motion stated that planetary orbits are ellipses, not perfect circles.

3.

His second law stated that, as planets orbit the Sun, they speed up and slow down in mathematically well defined (but, at the time, completely mysterious) ways.

4.

According to Kepler’s third law, the time taken to orbit the Sun depends in a simple way on the planets’ distance from the Sun.

IV.

Kepler described the kinematics of planets, just as Galileo had described the kinematics of rolling marbles.

A.

Galileo’s insights into acceleration tie in to the description provided by Kepler.

1.

Again,

acceleration

is the rate of change of velocity—the change in velocity divided by the time taken.

2.

Thus, even if the planets travel in perfect circles at constant speed, they are accelerating because their velocity (direction) is changing.

B.

Galileo’s observations of the phases of Venus served as strong support for Kepler’s model of the solar system. The Ptolemaic model would be unable to account for the fact that Venus had phases, just as our Moon does.

C.

Questions still remained, however: If the Earth is spinning, why don’t we feel dizzy? Why doesn’t the Earth fly away from the Sun? The stage was set for a profound scientific revolution, but it required the genius of Isaac Newton to provide the framework in the form of the scientific method, measurements, mathematics, physical theory, and “laws” of nature involving kinematics, force, and gravity, to pull the story together into an elegant and compelling whole.




Go to http://phet.colorado.edu. To help understand question 3 below, play with the 2D (“two-dimensional”) Motion sim. This simulation lets you watch an object moving in circles (and other paths) and examine the velocity and acceleration. Click on the Circular Motion button, then look at the velocity and acceleration arrows. The velocity arrow will probably make sense to you, but the acceleration arrow is harder to grasp. You might go back to the Maze Game and play around in the acceleration control mode again. How do you make an object go in a circle? The fundamental question is as follows: If you are walking in a circle, you are constantly changing the direction of your velocity. Which direction is the

change

? (

Change

is defined as the difference between final and initial values. Alternatively, change is what you have to add to the starting value to end up at the final value.) The direction of acceleration for an object moving steadily in a circle is always directly toward the center of that circle. This is a tough concept, and without math, we’re a little handicapped in understanding it. Just think about it! If you still don’t quite get it, it won’t matter much as we move on, but it is a very cool concept to grasp.

Recommended Computer Sim:

This sim comes from the University of British Columbia and is more directly related to Kepler’s laws and planetary orbits. Go to http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/~scharein/astro/.

1.

Start with the link labeled Phases of the Inner Planets. What are the observational differences between the Ptolemaic and Copernican models? (Telescopes were first used for astronomical observations in the early 1600s and obviously had a big impact on the acceptance of the Copernican model.)

2.

Next, go to the Retrograde Motion sim. Click the Trace On button to clearly see the planets’ motion. Which two planets are included in this model? This simulation explains why the Greeks called planets “wanderers.” Sometimes these special “stars” would move in the wrong direction against the background stars. It was this motion that compelled astronomers, including Ptolemy, to construct elaborate models to explain such curious observations.

3.

Finally, try the Kepler’s Laws sim. Notice that after a planet starts orbiting, an orange wedge appears. This wedge represents the area the planet has swept out in a given time. Even as the wedge changes shape, its area is always a constant. (This demonstrates the second of Kepler’s laws: a geometrical explanation of the fact that planets move faster when closer to the Sun.) If you exaggerate the elliptical nature of the orbit, this effect is more obvious. The screen also presents data on the

period

and

semi-major axis

(that’s basically the average distance to the Sun, the effective “radius” of the orbit) in the upper left-hand corner. Can you discover the quantitative relationship between these two numbers, a pattern that allows you to

predict

the period for planets at an arbitrary radius? (If not, don’t feel bad. Kepler was an extraordinary mathematician and “pattern finder.”)

Essential Reading:

Thinkwell

, “7: Orbital Motion” (first two segments). Hobson, chapter 1. March, start of chapter 4.


Crease, chapter 1. Gonick, chapters 2–5 span this and the next several lectures.

Questions to Consider:

How “sky aware” are you? What’s the current phase of the moon? If it has been awhile since you’ve done so, find a night to get away from city lights and just watch the starry night sky!

1.

Think about how you would measure the radius of the Earth if you had access only to tools and technology available 2000 years ago. How about the distance from the Earth to the Moon? From the Earth to the Sun?

2.

How would you convince a contemporary skeptic that the Earth is

not

flat or that the Earth is not the center of the solar system? Would you have sided with Copernicus if you read

De revolutionibus

in the late 1500s (after his death but before the invention of the telescope and, particularly, before Kepler’s careful analysis of the data on planetary motion)?

3.

In what ways is Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system better than the ancient Ptolemaic model? In what ways is it

worse

?



4.

I stated that an object moving in a perfect circle,

at a steady speed

, is accelerating. How can something accelerate if it goes at a steady speed? Can you make sense of this? If you drive your car in a tight circle at steady speed, does it

feel

like you are accelerating? (Recall that

acceleration

is defined as the rate of change of velocity, not the rate of change of speed.

Velocity

describes your speed

and

the direction you are going.)



Lecture Five Isaac Newton—The Dawn of Classical Physics

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth.

—Isaac Newton, from his early college notebook

Scope:

The historical turning point in the development of physics, the “dawn of classical physics” is easily located—it belongs to one man, Isaac Newton. Newton’s story is fascinating; he was an intense, lone character who single-handedly developed calculus, laws of motion, gravity, optics, and more, including his articulation of the scientific method in his

Principia

. We will look at the origins and development of Newton and his ideas and zoom in on the first two of his laws of motion, involving inertia (mass), acceleration, and force.

Outline

I.

Isaac Newton is so deeply tied to classical physics that he almost defines it.

A.

Isaac Newton was born in 1643, the year Galileo died, on a small farm in England. His father died before he was born, and his family was not particularly wealthy.

B.

As a boy, Newton was a decent student, and he began to really stand out in his teens.

C.

He was sent to Trinity College (a religious institution), where he studied philosophy, including natural philosophy, and mathematics.

1.

Newton was socially isolated and unhappy; as an adult, he was rather unpleasant, not a “nice guy.”

2.

He was partly self-taught, with a deep interest, even as a child, in natural phenomena. As a boy, he built sundials, model windmills, and kites on his own.

3.

His early notebook indicated amazing insight into the big questions about the natural world, ranging from light and sound to fluids, gravity, astronomy, and much more.

D.

In 1665, at the age of 22, Newton returned to the family farm because of an outbreak of the plague. In less than two years, his genius blossomed, and he produced the core of physical and mathematical insights to which he would return throughout his professional life.

1.

This is the period of the (apocryphal) story of a falling apple providing the flash of insight into the universal nature of gravity

2.

Newton knew of Kepler’s discoveries and worked on deep astronomical questions.

3.

Because algebra and geometry were too limited to solve the astronomical and physical problems involving changing quantities that Newton was working on, he invented the calculus to help.

4.

The

Principia

, containing many of the ideas Newton developed during this time, was not published until 1687. Newton’s ego and personality were not conducive to sharing his work, but he was badgered into publishing by Edmond Halley (of comet fame).

5.

The

Principia

is perhaps the greatest, most influential single publication in the history of science. It is a rich treatise of Newton’s new physics and its application to astronomy, including his law of gravity, his investigations into optics, and his articulation of the scientific method.

E.

As mentioned, Newton was apparently not a nice man—suspicious, quick to anger, jealous, and erratic. He mistreated contemporaries, including Robert Hooke and, later, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the “other” inventor of calculus.

II.

Some of the fundamental ideas that Newton developed, particularly his laws of motion, form the basis for much of classical physics.

A.

Newton’s first law (N-I) the law of inertia, states: If there are no outside forces (or if outside forces cancel out), an object at rest remains at rest; an object in motion remains in motion (in the same direction with the same speed) indefinitely.

B.

In formulating this law, Newton elaborated on and clarified ideas produced by Galileo and others.

C.

Newton’s first law ties in closely to the concept of

frame of reference

; this is defined, essentially, as one’s position as an observer.



1.

You and I may have two different frames of reference, and we may agree or disagree in our observations of the same phenomenon.

2.

For example, if we both observe a marble rolling across a table from different positions, we might agree that the marble is moving at a rate of 2 meters per second.

3.

However, if you are observing the marble while you travel parallel to it on a rolling cart, you might observe that the marble is at rest as you move along beside it.

4.

This idea builds on Galileo’s principle of relativity, which tells us that although different observers may choose different ways to describe motion (some things are relative), the principles of physics themselves are invariant.

III.

Newton’s second law (N-II) addresses the question: What causes a change in motion of an object? The answer is the application of a force.

A.

Newton’s law is written

F

=

ma

, that is, force equals mass times acceleration; it relates the force on an object to the inertia (mass) of the object and the resulting acceleration.

B.

Let’s look at the three common English words in this equation:

force

,

mass

, and

acceleration

.

1.

Again, we must be careful not to confuse common English uses of these words with the physicist’s carefully constructed operational definitions.

2.

To a physicist,

force

means push or pull, and it is measured quantitatively, for example, with a spring scale. The unit of measurement for force is a metric unit called the

newton

; 1 newton of force is a gentle push. In the English system of measurement, force is measured in pounds.

3.

Forces refer to the interactions of objects. Forces can be applied by living beings or inanimate objects.

4.

Examples of forces include the gravitational force, the contact force of a chair holding you up, the tug of a rope, and the push of a stretched spring.

C.

Mass

is part of Newton’s law of inertia. In everyday English,

inertia

means sluggishness, resistance to change. In a similar vein, all material objects have a certain resistance to change in motion. Thus, mass is a quantitative measure of an object’s inertia. In the metric system, mass is measured in kilograms.

D.

As we’ve said,

acceleration

is a description of motion; it tells us the rate of change of velocity.

E.

N-II, then, tells us what the resulting acceleration of an object will be as a result of the application of a force.

F.

N-II is about cause and effect: Force is the cause, and acceleration is the effect. Mass is a relevant number that tells us how these two factors are related.

G.

Kinematics described motion, but N-II helps us explain, predict, and control motion.

IV.

Along with Newton’s third law (N-III) and the law of gravity (which we’ll get to soon), these deceptively simple relations form the heart of classical physics.

A.

The force concept is rich and deep. It takes practice to master the subtleties! We will return to it in the next lecture and beyond.

B.

Newton’s laws are the basis for a simple, mechanical, deterministic, and quantitative description of a vast array of observable phenomena.

C.

Newton single-handedly changed the world, and we’ll spend much of the rest of this course tackling the amazing ideas he came up with.


Go to http://phet.colorado.edu and play with Forces in 1D. Try to make sense of the various graphs. Can you connect what’s happening to the object to what’s being plotted? (Use the slider on the left of the force graph to apply a force, rather than applying the force on the object itself.) Go to More Controls to turn off friction and see how that influences the simulation. Can you verify the rule that states, “If there is no net force, the velocity is constant,” even when there

is

friction?

Essential Reading:

Thinkwell

, “1: Rel Motion/Ref Frames,” “3: Dynamics, Newton’s Three Laws” (first two parts). Hewitt, start of chapter 4.



Hobson, start of chapter 4. March, start of chapter 3.


Cropper, chapter 2. Gleick. Gonick, chapters 6-7 span this and the next several lectures.


Why would the idea of “universal gravity” (acting on an apple or the Moon) be so radical in Newton’s time? Is it obvious? What does this tell you about the scientific worldview regarding gravity and planets before Newton?

2.

If you are in the space shuttle and a heavy metal object is loose and floating past you, will it be very easy to move around because it’s “weightless”?

3.

How are mass, inertia, and weight related to one another? How are they different? Do kilograms and pounds measure exactly the same thing? If not, what’s the fundamental difference?

4.

Surface gravity on the Moon is about 1/6 of what it is here on the Earth. If you go to the Moon, what happens to your weight? What happens to your mass?

5.

Consider two observers in two different reference frames watching the same object, perhaps a box of books being pushed across the floor. What physical quantities will the two observers agree on, and what will they disagree about (mass, position, velocity, acceleration, force)?

6.

If you’re in shape to do so, go to a gym and put a comfortably heavy dumbbell in each hand With your arms down at your sides, do some squats, fairly quickly. (No knee injuries, please!) Note carefully how heavy the dumbbells

feel

as you initially push off the ground, as you ascend, as you stand to full height, as you descend, and as you reach the bottom of your squat. How does this fit in with

F

=

ma

?



Lecture Six Newton Quantified—Force and Acceleration

I understand what an equation means if I have a way of figuring out the characteristics of its solution without solving it.

—Paul Dirac

Scope:

The one master equation for this course, and the heart of mechanics, is Newton’s formal statement of this relationship between cause and effect, force and acceleration: force equals mass times acceleration,

F

=

ma

. This is the formula that determines almost all of classical physics. It’s both simple and deep, and it’s pretty tough to make sense of. To develop a “force concept,” we will talk about thought experiments involving pushes and pulls, figure out how to quantify and visualize the three terms in Newton’s law, and then consider the myriad ramifications. The law is quite universal—it can be used to predict, describe, and understand the motion of just about anything!

Outline

I.

Dynamics

involves the explanation, rather than simply the description, of motion.

A.

Newton, following Galileo, recognized the central question is not what keeps an object going but, instead, what makes its motion change.

1.

As we said in the last lecture,

force

is about push and pull.

2.

The equation

F

=

ma

quantifies motion: If we apply a measured degree of force, we can calculate the acceleration, which tells us the rate of change in velocity. Knowing velocity over time enables us to predict where the object will be at a certain point.

3.

Newton’s work leads to a new branch of physics—

dynamics

, which explains motion, rather than simply describing it.

B.

N-I and N-II are coupled and explain that inertia is the natural tendency of objects to remain in motion, while forces cause change. Specifically, force determines the rate of change of velocity.

C.

These laws, developed from (often simple) experiments, have been as well tested as any physical principle in history. Newton’s laws are manifested everywhere in life, from driving cars to watching sports.

D.

However, we should also note that Newton’s laws are technically wrong; e.g., Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that we must modify how we think about mass and inertia when we are dealing with very large or very small scales.

E.

Most people struggle to make sense of Newton’s laws.

1.

Think again of the Aristotelian cart. We know from Newton’s laws that it stops moving because of a force (of friction).

2.

Part of Newton’s genius (and Aristotle’s failing), was recognizing that friction is just another force among many.

3.

It takes a lot of practice to look at a situation and articulate and delineate the various forces acting in that situation.

II.

N-II (

F

=

ma

) tells many stories.

A.

Thought experiments help unpack the relationship and make sense of it.

1.

An air hockey table is a good example of an environment in which friction is reduced. Imagine that you have a puck attached to a weighted string resting on an air hockey table (hanging over an edge). You could easily watch the force of gravity pulling on the string and causing the puck to accelerate across the table.

2.

As you watch, you might see that the puck is accelerating at a constant rate of 1 meter per second per second (1 m/sec

2

).

3.

What if you pull on the string twice as hard? You’ll note that the puck accelerates at a constant rate of 2 meters per second per second. You have doubled the acceleration because you’ve doubled the force.

4.

What if you double the mass of the puck by stacking another one on top of it? The puck will accelerate half as rapidly.



B.

Part of our confusion involving Newton’s laws is that we are not kinesthetically aware of all the forces that are at work. In this situation, as you pull the string, the puck, not you, experiences the friction.

1.

If you’re pushing a box of books across the floor, you’re aware of the force that you’re applying, but you’re not directly aware of the frictional force of the ground pushing backward on the box.

2.

If the two forces acting on the box cancel each other completely, then there is no net force on the box and, thus, no acceleration.

3.

Knowledge of N-II helps us to become more aware, even kinesthetically, of the forces present in the world.

4.

Physics is

not

counterintuitive, but we do have to think clearly and carefully about what we believe we know.

C.

Let’s return to the idea of net (or total) force.

1.

Consider Galileo’s cannonball dropped from the Tower of Pisa. After the cannonball is let go, it is acted on by only one force (gravity—the

weight

of the object) and, thus, accelerates down.

2.

Before the ball is dropped, it is acted on by two forces—the downward force of gravity and the upward

contact

force from the hand holding it. These two forces combine and cancel each other out. With no net force, the object at rest—the cannonball—remains at rest.

3.

When the hand lets go of the cannonball, only one force—gravity—is acting; thus, the ball will accelerate downward.

4.

On the way down, air resistance will build up. This is another force, which points upward, opposing the motion. The net force while falling, then, is weight (pulling downward) and air resistance (pushing up). These will

partly

cancel, but for ordinary objects, the weight dominates, and the object still accelerates downward.

III.

The equation

F

=

ma

is a relationship, an expression of cause and effect. There are many points to make to fully understand this relationship.

A.

The equation is not a definition or tautology. Each of the terms can be independently measured, determined, and defined.

1.

Force is measured in newtons. A newton is about 1/5 of a pound, what you feel in your palm when you hold a big apple.

2.

Mass is measured in kilograms; the American unit—the slug—is almost never used.

3.

Acceleration is measured in meters per second per second. That’s not a typo—it tells you how much faster you go (in m/sec) every second. It’s the rate of change of your velocity.

B.

N-II is not just a “good idea.” It’s one of the fundamental laws of nature. The “big deal” is that it predicts and describes everything—it’s universal. It’s a part of engineering, of all the sciences, and of our lives.

C.

Force has a direction, which tells us the direction of acceleration; mathematically, we call it a

vector

.

1.

Picture force as an arrow. It has a magnitude (how strong the push or pull is) and a direction.

2.

We can also picture velocity as an arrow; it, too, has a magnitude (length) and a direction. The force arrow and the velocity arrow are different; one doesn’t tell you the other. Force doesn’t cause velocity; it causes the change in velocity.

3.

Finally, picture acceleration as a third arrow. The magnitude tells you how rapidly the velocity is changing, and the direction tells you which way the velocity is changing.

4.

The direction of the force tells you the direction of the acceleration. They’re the same direction; that’s N-II.

5.

Mass has no direction; it’s just a number. Mass does not point down; it’s the force of gravity acting on mass that does so.

D.

For most people, the idea that applying more force causes more acceleration is intuitive, as is the idea that the greater the mass of an object, the less acceleration will result from application of a force.

E.

We can use the equation in both directions: Force predicts acceleration, but acceleration can be observed to deduce forces. Think of all the possible applications.

1.

We can successfully design roads to keep cars safely accelerating through a curve, steer rockets to Mars, or guide electrons through a circuit in a computer.

2.

We can determine “invisible” forces by watching their influence on subatomic particles or stars in the galaxy.




Go to http://phet.colorado.edu and again play with Forces in 1D. Can you investigate and verify N-II (

F

=

ma

) with the sim? What happens if you double the net force? What happens if you double the mass? What happens when you add friction? Can you verify that it is the total force, not just your applied force, that matters? Also check out the Ramp to see if you can start to put together the vector nature of forces. Keep in mind, once again, it is only the total force (the “arrow” that arises from adding all the individual forces) that matters.

Essential Reading:

Thinkwell

, rest of “6: Dynamics, Newton’s Three Laws.” Hewitt, rest of chapter 4. Hobson, middle of chapter 4. March, rest of chapter 3.


Gleick. Gonick, chapters 2–7 continue to span this material.


Use Newton’s laws to explain how and why seatbelts and air bags work. Why do they help protect you?

2.

Does a body always move in the direction of the net force on it? Why or why not?

3.

After a rocket is launched, its velocity and acceleration increase with time as the rocket engines continue to fire, even if they are exerting a steady (constant) thrust (force). Can you explain how and why both velocity and acceleration continue to increase? (The former is not so hard; the latter is a little subtler.)

4.

It takes a lot of force on the pedals to get a bike moving up to speed, but much less to coast along at constant speed. Why is that? When the bike is coasting along the flats, you do have to apply a little force to keep a constant speed. But Newton says that if your velocity is constant, there is zero net force. How can you make sense of this?

5.

If you are in an elevator that accelerates up, you will feel a little heavier than usual. If the elevator is accelerating down, you feel a little lighter than usual. Try to use Newton’s law to make sense of these physical sensations.



Lecture Seven Newton and the Connections to Astronomy

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

—Richard Feynman

Scope:

Applying N-II (

F

=

ma

) in real-life situations requires a lot of finesse, but it provides a framework for making sense of a vast variety of phenomena. Thinking about circular motion led Newton directly to a qualitative and quantitative understanding of planetary motion, closing the loop with Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus and making sense

of a Sun-centered solar system and its connection to everyday motion. In the process, Newton forever changed our views on our place in the universe and the structure of physical laws.

Outline

I.

Let’s begin with a quick recap of Newton’s first two laws.

A.

The first is the law of inertia: In the absence of an external net force, an object in motion will remain in motion at a constant velocity forever.

B.

The second law,

F

=

ma

,

quantifies the notion of inertia; it tells us how pushes and pulls affect motion.

II.

Let’s think about the connections with gravity, leading us back (in the end) to central questions of astronomy and the solar system.

A.

The force of gravity on an object, called its

weight

, depends on the mass, but it is not the same as the mass.

1.

Light objects have less “stuff” in them, and correspondingly, the tug of gravity on them is less.

2.

An anvil in the space station would have the same mass that it does on the Earth. It would be just as hard to accelerate the anvil in space. (Its weight is another question, to which we will return.)

B.

Near the Earth, the force of gravity is proportional to mass. Combining this fact with N-II leads to a stunning conclusion: All objects in freefall accelerate at the same rate.

1.

Galileo discovered this empirically, but Newton provides a simple and clear explanation of this phenomenon.

2.

To understand Newton’s explanation, let’s rewrite

F

=

ma

to read:

a

=

F

/

m

.

3.

Now think about the solid cannonball being dropped off the Tower of Pisa. It may have 10 times the mass of a hollow cannonball, but it also has 10 times the weight. Thus, the force of gravity on that massive object is 10 times greater. The mass and the force cancel each other. The result? Both the solid and the hollow cannonball (in fact, all objects feeling only gravity) accelerate at the same rate.

4.

Near the Earth, all objects accelerate by 9.8 m/sec each second (10 m/sec is very roughly 20 miles/hr, or 32 ft/sec). Think about what this means—every second, you go 10 m/sec faster than you were going before.

5.

If we take into account air resistance, this story changes slightly, but gravity still dominates.

III.

What happens when gravity acts on an object that is already moving? If I tossed my key ring, for example, we all know that it would follow an arc as it fell to the ground.

A.

Galileo recognized the

principle of superposition

in such a situation: Sideways motion and vertical motion are independent. N-II (

F

=

ma

) can be applied

separately

to both “aspects” of motion.

B.

Without gravity, a sideways moving object continues moving sideways forever.

C.

With gravity, an ever-increasing downward motion is added.

1.

According to

F

=

ma

, a downward force causes a downward acceleration.

2.

The sideways “component” of the motion continues unaffected.

3.

Superposing

these two effects, the resulting path is a lovely and simple parabolic arc.

IV.

What does it take to make an object go in a circle?

A.

If you are walking in a circle, even if your speed is never changing, circular motion most definitely implies that you are accelerating.



1.

Picture walking in a circle. Let your hand point ahead, in the direction of your instantaneous velocity. Imagine watching from above—your hand points in different directions all the time. Your velocity is always changing (direction)!

2.

Which way is it changing? To walk in a circle, every step you take, you need to go a little toward the center of the circle; otherwise, you’ll follow a straight line and go away from the center.

B.

You need a force to accelerate. An object will not naturally go in a circle unless there is a force on it.

1.

The equation

F

=

ma

applies to any kind of motion. If the object is going in a circle, an inward force must be applied, pointing toward the center of the circle.

2.

A “center-seeking” force is called a

centripetal force

. (

Centrifugal force

, in contrast, is the sense of being thrown outward when you are moving in a circle in a non-inertial, or accelerating, reference frame.)

V.

Newton’s grand insight was that gravity is a universal force that applies as much to the Moon, Earth, and Sun as to apples. The same law of motion for terrestrial objects explains celestial motion.

A.

Why does an apple fall? Because of gravity. How high, then, does gravity reach?

1.

Even climbers at the top of Mt. Everest feel gravity; it clearly reaches up as high as any terrestrial places.

2.

Newton asked: What if it reaches all the way up to the Moon and beyond? The answer was his “aha!” moment. Gravity must be the reason that the Moon circles around the Earth, rather than traveling in a straight line (and leaving us).

B.

Gravity is universal, and there is nothing inherently mystical about the Moon, planets, or stars. Their behavior follows Newton’s laws just as Galileo’s marbles or any other objects do.

C.

If gravity pulls on the Moon, why doesn’t it fall toward the Earth?

1.

It does! Remember, when you walk in a circle, your velocity is changing; you are accelerating toward the center. If you did not, you would walk away in a line.

2.

The sideways velocity of the Moon is unaffected by gravity, so it does not change. As the Moon falls toward the Earth, it is also moving to the side because of its sideways speed. This is precisely what yields a circular (or elliptical) path for the Moon.

D.

Newton’s laws unify very disparate realms of investigation.

1.

Kepler formulated three laws of planetary motion: All planets move in ellipses; they speed up and slow down; and the distance of a planet from the Sun tells us its average speed. Newton saw that these observations arise mathematically from

F

=

ma

.

2.

Newton’s insight connected Galileo’s marble on a ramp to an apple falling straight down out of a tree and to the Moon in orbit.

3.

You can see this insight another way if you think about a toy on the end of a rope that you might swing around your head before letting it fly. The toy on the end of the rope is traveling in a circle because the rope is pulling it inward. As you swing the rope, you are also giving the toy a sideways motion. When you let go, you will see the toy continue in a sideways motion until gravity pulls it down.

4.

Newton’s laws are quantitative. We can derive the numerical values for the acceleration and check that they match the astronomical data.

5.

The scientific worldview provided by Newton is, in a sense, complete: We can use it to describe microscopic and macroscopic phenomena (subject only to the subtle modifications of relativity and quantum mechanics).

6.

In the next lecture, we’ll talk about one more key piece to the gravity story: How does gravity depend on distance?


Go to http://phet.colorado.edu and play with Projectile Motion and 2D Motion. Projectile Motion gives a sense for the motion of an object with a constant downward acceleration. Can you make measurements to see for yourself that “sideways motion” is constant, even though “up-and-down motion” steadily accelerates downward? Does the path, and changing speed, make sense to you, based on Newton’s laws? You may have already looked at 2D Motion, but look again, and see how the direction of acceleration for an object moving in a circle matches up perfectly with the



direction of the force of gravity. This is one of the subtler points of this lecture: Moving in a circle with constant speed means that your acceleration is directly toward the center of the circle. Convince yourself that this is correct and makes sense, rather than just taking my word for it!

Essential Reading:

Hewitt, start of chapter 8. Hobson, start of chapter 5. March, start of chapter 4.

Thinkwell

, “2: Uniform Circular Motion,” “3: Dynamics of Circular Motion,” and “7: Orbital Motion” (again, if you need it).


Gonick, chapters 2–7 continue to span this material.


If you drop two identical bricks side by side, nobody has any difficulty imagining they will accelerate at the same rate. But some people still struggle with the idea that a brick “twice as big” won’t accelerate faster. Imagine that the two bricks are dropped right next to each other. Does that make any difference? Would it make any difference if they had sticky sides? What if they were so close that, partway down, they touched and stuck to each other? Would that suddenly make them fall faster? What if they were stuck together the whole way down? Can you make more sense of

why

heavy and light objects fall at the same rate now?

2.

Two objects fall freely. Their acceleration is the same. Does this mean that they must both have the same mass? Does it mean that they both feel the same force?

3.

How is it possible for an object to be moving in one direction but accelerating in a different direction? Can you think of some examples? Could you possibly drive through a curved path without accelerating? (Think about your answer to this in two different ways. First, consider kinematics: Can you go around a curve without changing your velocity vector? Next, think about it from Newton’s perspective: Can you navigate a curved path with zero force at any time?)

4.

Is the speed of a struck baseball the same throughout its parabolic arc?

5.

A friend who is not listening to these lectures insists that you are not accelerating if you drive around a curve at constant speed, because the speedometer remains steady. Refute this argument. (Can you do so in multiple ways?)

6.

You fire a tranquilizer dart exactly horizontally out of a gun and, at the exact same moment, drop a second dart from a resting point at the same height as the dart gun. Neglecting air resistance, which one hits the ground first? (This may be surprising, but remember the principle that horizontal motion is independent of vertical motion.) You can set up a little “home experiment” to try this. The simplest setup is to place a ruler near the edge of a table and put one nickel on top of the ruler and a second nickel on the edge of the table in front of the ruler. Give the ruler a quick snap so that it strikes the nickel on the edge of the table and jerks out from underneath the other. The struck nickel goes flying (in a straight horizontal direction), and the nickel on top just falls from a resting point straight down. Listen carefully; they will hit the ground at the same time. Try it! The experiment may take some practice or variations to get it to work right. You need to be careful that: (1) both objects start to freefall at the same time and (2) neither object is given any

vertical

motion at the starting instant.



Lecture Eight Universal Gravitation

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

—Albert Einstein

Scope:

Newton’s laws of motion needed to be combined with a law of gravitation in order to complete the job of predicting and understanding planetary motion. The deduction of the law of gravity involved some speculation, a little math, and a lot of creativity! In the end, the universal nature of gravity meant that Newton’s worldview was simple and “complete”—unifying terrestrial and celestial phenomena into one framework. It took another 100 years to finish the story quantitatively, that is, to directly measure the numerical strength of the force of gravity, rather than its general properties, at which point, the story of gravity was effectively closed until Einstein’s general relativity.

Outline

I.

As you recall from the last lecture, gravity is universal, and circular motion results from a steady pull toward the center.

A.

When you are walking in a circle at a steady speed, two things are going on with each step: You’re taking a sideways step (tangent to the circle) and an inward step (returning back toward the center of the circle). Each inward step represents a change in your velocity.

B.

Remember, acceleration tells us two things: in which direction the velocity is changing and how rapidly it is changing. When you think about uniform circular motion (just walking steadily around in a circle), you might not think that you are accelerating toward the center, but in fact, this acceleration can be measured in m/sec

2

.

C.

What does this measurement depend on? A little geometry and careful thought can tell you the numerical amount of acceleration given just your sideways speed and the radius of the circle.

II.

High-quality astronomical information was available to Newton, enabling him to quantitatively check the success of his theory of motion for planets.

A.

The distance to the Moon was known, even by the ancient Greeks.

1.

People also knew the duration of the Moon’s orbit, about a month.

2.

Keep in mind that the circumference of the Moon’s orbit is the distance traveled. If the distance traveled and time taken are known, then the average speed of the Moon’s orbit could be calculated. Knowing the speed and the radius then allowed Newton to calculate the Moon’s acceleration.

B.

We might expect the acceleration of the Moon to be the same as that of any object on the Earth, namely, 9.8 m/sec

2

. Newton found, however, that the Moon’s acceleration was roughly 3600 times smaller than this.

C.

Is the force of gravity the same that far away from the Earth?

1.

The Moon’s distance from the Earth is roughly 60 times the Earth’s radius (the Earth’s radius is approximately 6000 km).

2.

If you’re holding an apple in your hand on the surface of the Earth, you are a certain distance away from the center of the Earth. The Moon is 60 times farther away from the center, and its acceleration is 3600 times smaller.

3.

Newton saw, then, that gravity decreases as an object gets farther away from the Earth; specifically, the force of gravity decreases as the square of the distance.

4.

If the object is twice as far away from the Earth, gravity is 2 squared = 2

×

2 = 4 times weaker. If the object is 60 times farther away, gravity is

60 60 3600

× =

times weaker.

III.

Newton invoked a new principle, the universal law of gravity, to make sense of his observations.

A.

Gravity still affects all objects, but its strength weakens with distance.

B.

The force of gravity points from the center of one object, such as a planet, to the center of another. Recall that the force must be directed toward the center in order to maintain the circular motion.



C.

The force of gravity also depends on the mass of the two objects involved. Indeed, it is directly proportional to the masses.

D.

Given that the Earth and the Moon are so massive, the force of gravity between them must be huge, but does that mean that the acceleration is also huge? N-II (

F

=

ma

) tells us that the answer is no. The large force on the Moon is canceled out by its large mass (or inertia).

E.

We can use this universal law to compute the force of gravity on the Earth.

1.

Again, the distance from an object on the surface of the Earth to the center is about 6000 km. Climbing a tree makes that distance about 6000.003 km, which wouldn’t make much difference in your calculations of the force of gravity. Even at the top of Mt. Everest, the distance to the center of the Earth is only about 6010 km.

2.

You must get much farther away, to astronomical distances, to notice that the force of gravity is getting weaker. At 6000 km

above

the Earth’s surface, the force of gravity would be 4 times weaker.

IV.

Although it helps us understand a broad variety of complex phenomena, such as the motion of the planets, the tides, and so on, Newton’s law of gravity is descriptive, not explanatory.

A.

A child who says that a pen falls to the floor “because of gravity” is not explaining the effect but merely giving it a name. (We need Einstein to go to the next step.)

B.

The new law involved a new kind of physics—a

force law

of action at a distance. Not everyone liked this (strange!) idea, including Newton.

C.

A goal of physics is to make as few underlying basic assumptions as possible to explain as broad a spectrum of phenomena as possible.

V.

There is one missing piece to the story we’ve talked about so far. Newton’s law of gravity is still just one of proportionality.

A.

As we’ve said, all objects on the Earth accelerate at 9.8 m/sec

2

. The reason this acceleration is universal is that the force of gravity, on one side of the equation

F

=

ma

, depends on the mass, but there is also a mass on the other side of the equation; thus, the two masses cancel, leaving always the same numerical value for acceleration.

B.

The Earth is accelerating toward the Sun, as is the Moon. As long as they are at the same distance from the Sun, all objects accelerate at the same rate.

1.

If we added another planet, much more massive than the Earth, according to Newton’s laws, the force from the Sun would be proportional to the mass, but the acceleration would be inversely proportional to the mass; the two would cancel, and we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

2.

Thus, the Earth doesn’t have to be the mass that it is; it could have been any mass and its orbit would still be the same.

3.

In the Newtonian era, then, the mass of the Earth could not be known by looking at its orbital motion.

C.

Newton’s law of gravity

almost

helps us determine the mass of the Earth.

1.

The magnitude of the force of gravity is

proportional to

the mass of one object and the mass of the other object divided by the square of the distance between the two.

2.

The phrase

proportional to

points to one number, a

proportionality constant

, that must be found.

3.

Attempting to determine this universal constant of gravity became a significant intellectual and experimental task in Newton’s time and afterward. The problem was ultimately solved by Henry Cavendish 100 years after Newton (in 1798) in an exquisitely difficult and delicate experiment.

4.

By combining his results with the lunar acceleration, Cavendish was able to “weigh” the Earth, giving important knowledge to geologists, astronomers, and other scientists.

D.

In an absolute sense, gravity is a stunningly weak force, the weakest fundamental force we know of. Yet, because the Earth and Sun are so big, it has played a dominant role in the discovery of physical laws, not to mention in our lives.

E.

In the next lecture, we’ll look at Newton’s third law and start to think about some issues beyond gravity, such as energy and momentum.

Essential Reading:

Thinkwell

, “7: Gravity.”



Hewitt, rest of chapter 8. Hobson, rest of chapter 5. March, rest of chapter 4.


Crease, chapter 5. Gonick, chapters 2–7 continue to span this material.


What do Newton’s apple and the Moon have in common?

2.

How

could

you figure out the radius of the Earth using only observational data? The distance from the Earth to the Moon? The distance from the Earth to the Sun?

3.

Newton’s law of gravity says that the gravitational force between any two objects grows as they get closer as the inverse of their distance. If you are standing on the Earth, isn’t your distance

zero

? (In which case, does his law of gravity predict an

infinite force

? Why not?)

4.

If the Sun suddenly collapsed into a white dwarf star, with the same mass concentrated into a vastly smaller volume, what would happen to the Earth’s orbit? (The answer may be a little surprising. What does Newton’s law say matters for determining gravity and, therefore, orbit?) What would happen if the Sun somehow suddenly lost half its mass?

5.

If you have two objects, each 1 kg, at a distance 1 meter apart, they will feel the spectacularly small gravitational force of 7

×

10

–11

newtons. (That’s 7 hundredths of a billionth of a newton.) Given that the force on a 1-kg object near the Earth’s surface is 9.8 newtons (that’s the weight of 1 kg) and knowing the Earth’s radius (from our lecture), estimate the mass of the Earth. Given the radius, estimate the volume of the Earth. Now, you can compute the

density

of the Earth (mass/volume). How does this compare with the density of water? Of dirt?

6.

How could you figure out the mass of the Moon?



Lecture Nine Newton’s Third Law

That Professor Goddard, with his “chair” in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react— to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

—

New York Times

editorial, 1920

Scope:

Newton’s laws lead us to think about change in motion as arising from interactions between objects (which we call

forces

). Newton carefully articulated this in a third law of motion, commonly stated as: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Newton’s third law can be exasperatingly counterintuitive at first; you need to think carefully about your experiences and understanding of the first two laws to make sense of it. Re-expressing Newton’s laws in terms of a new quantity,

momentum

(or “oomph,” as I like to think of it) helps us to see the implications of Newton’s laws more clearly and in a fresh light. Combined, Newton’s second and third laws tell us that momentum is

conserved

—although it can shift around and reconfigure internally, the total (for isolated systems) never changes!

Outline

I.

Newton’s laws were a huge step forward because they showed us that motion can be understood from universal principles, not the character of individual objects.

A.

Forces between the objects are responsible for their behavior.

B.

Newton never wrote

F

=

ma

in that form. He thought of forces as

interactions

.

II.

Force as interaction led Newton to his third law, commonly stated as: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

A.

Rather than focusing on only the one object that is being pushed, think of a pair of interacting objects, the “pusher and pushee.”

1.

Imagine standing on an ice rink or on roller skates (which would eliminate friction) and pushing on a wall. As you push on the wall, it pushes back on you.

2.

You can think of this as a single interaction between you and the wall, or you can think separately of the force exerted on you by the wall and the force exerted on the wall by you.

3.

Thinking about the distinct yet intimate connection between these two forces led Newton to his third law, with implications from particle physics to rocket science to police accident investigations.

B.

If objects A and B interact (apply forces on one another), Newton’s third law (N-III) says: “The force of A on B is always equal in magnitude (but opposite in direction) to the force of B on A.” (You cannot touch without being touched.)

1.

We refer to these two forces as

force pairs

; forces always come in such pairs. Newton argued that it is productive to think carefully about the two separate forces acting on the two separate bodies.

2.

When you apply N-II (

F

=

ma

), you focus on

one

object. The

F

(force) refers to the force

on

that one object. The

m

(mass) refers to the mass of that one object, and the

a

(acceleration) refers to the rate of change of velocity of that one object. (If you wear roller skates and push forward on the wall, you go backwards.)

3.

N-III is a law of nature, a description of how the world works in the same vein as N-I or N-II. It is experimentally verified. Properly interpreted, there is no way around it.

C.

N-III allows us to understand more deeply such simple phenomena as how we are able to walk!

1.

Pay attention as you walk forward. You push backwards against the ground. (Notice the motion of dirt backwards as you move quickly from rest.)

2.

As you push backward on the ground, the ground pushes forward on you. This is N-III in action, or the evidence of a force pair: The harder you push back, the harder the ground pushes forward.

3.

As you walk, you are pushing the Earth backwards, but because of the huge mass of the Earth, its backward acceleration is so tiny as to be unmeasurable.



4.

If there was no friction between you and the ground, you could not apply a backwards force to it, and in turn, there would be no forward force on you. (You cannot walk on a frictionless surface.)

III.

N-III is subtle and has many consequences.

A.

Consider a crash between a truck going 60 mph and a stationary compact car. The truck would plow right on through, mashing the car in the process. Is it really true that the force of the truck on the car is equal (in strength) to the force of the car on the truck? Let’s look at the details of such a collision to keep our explanation concrete.

1.

Picture a truck that weighs 11 times as much as the car. The collision is brief; the car is squashed and sticks to the nose of the truck. The

crash time

, the brief moment during which there is some interaction between the car and the truck, is the same for both vehicles. Immediately after the impact, the truck is still cruising down the highway, having slowed from 60 to 55 mph.

2.

Our intuition says (correctly) that something far worse happens to the car than the truck. The car, after all, is squashed, and the truck is still moving down the highway. Is this a violation of N-III? No! Let’s try to clarify what our intuition is telling us.

3.

The truck slowed from 60 to 55 mph, a change of 5 mph. The car changed its speed from 0 to 55. Acceleration is "velocity change" / "time elapsed". The acceleration of the car is much greater than that of the truck. In the same time, the car's velocity change is 11 times greater! (55 mph more, compared to 5 mph less).

4.

Thus, our intuition is correct; something is much different, much greater, for the car. That “something,” however, is not the force but the acceleration!

5.

If the car has 11 times smaller mass but 11 times greater acceleration, the product of

F

=

ma

is exactly the same. This is what N-III tells us must always be the case. The amount of force of the car on the truck and the truck on the car is the same, but the consequences are different because the masses are different.

6.

Think of

F

=

ma

for just the driver in the car and the driver in the truck. They have similar masses but very different accelerations, and thus, they experience different forces.

7.

Finally, note that the car speeds up, and the truck slows down. The forces (and, therefore, the accelerations) are opposite in directions. N-II and N-III dovetail.

B.

In 1920, the

New York Times

ridiculed Robert Goddard (1882

−

1945), the father of modern American rocketry. He dreamed of rockets flying to the Moon or Mars, but the

Times

editor mocked his lack of understanding of N-III.

1.

The editor thought that a rocket must have something solid (such as the Earth) to “push against” in order to move. This assumption is only partly correct.

2.

Think of the rocket expelling small bits of fuel out the back. Even in the vacuum of space, the act of expelling a fuel molecule is an interaction. The rocket pushes on the fuel, and the fuel pushes back (equally!) on the rocket. This is the propulsive force that accelerates the rocket.

3.

The

New York Times

apology came in print in the late 1960s when

Apollo

11

was on its way to the Moon, a little too late for Goddard.

C.

N-III takes some getting used to, but when you make sense of it, it helps clarify what

force

means, how to visualize it and use it correctly. Coupling N-III with N-II led Newton to think about motion in a new and productive way.

IV.

As we said, Newton never wrote

F

=

ma

in his

Principia

. Instead, he was thinking about a quality of motion that we now call

momentum

.

A.

Consider a small object (a point mass). It moves with velocity (

v

) and has mass (

m

). It has some inertia (resistance to motion) and something that we’ll call “oomph.”

1.

Bigger masses carry more oomph. Imagine being hit in the stomach by a bowling ball versus a tennis ball. The bowling ball has more oomph.

2.

Bigger velocity means more oomph, too. Imagine being hit by a pebble that someone has tossed at you gently versus a pebble fired at high speed from a slingshot.

B.

Newton defines

momentum

(oomph) to be the product of mass and velocity; put another way, momentum =

mv

. This is a quantitative measure of oomph.



1.

This formula is a definition, as opposed to

F

=

ma

, which is an experimentally verifiable relationship among different quantities.

2.

The word

momentum

carries with it lots of English-language connotations. As always, we must be careful to distinguish our casual sense of the word from its new formal physics definition. In this case, however, the casual usage matches pretty well with what the new definition implies.

3.

Momentum has a direction, the direction of velocity.

4.

When you apply a force to an object, you change its momentum, and you change it at a particular rate.

5.

Newton’s way of thinking about his second law was not

F

=

ma

but

F

= change in momentum/time taken (momentum change per second). This rate of

change

in momentum is different from

momentum

; force is the rate at which momentum changes.

6.

If you push an object that’s at rest, you will change its momentum; it will start to move.

F

=

ma

is one way to think about this phenomenon;

F

= change in momentum/change in time is another way to think about it. These two ideas are the same.

V.

N-II and N-III together tell us something essential about the world: For isolated systems, total momentum is conserved; it does not change (in total strength or direction) as time goes by.

A.

If

F

= 0, there is no rate of change of momentum. Something that does not change is

constant

, or

conserved

.

B.

Conservation laws are a big idea in physics. If you know how much momentum you start with and your system is isolated (that is, there is no outside force on it), total momentum will always stay the same.

1.

Having something (anything!) that stays constant in the face of arbitrary complexity is like an anchor, something solid we can count on and take enormous advantage of.

2.

No matter how complicated a system is (with arbitrarily complicated internal gears, pulleys, pushes, and pulls), if the overall external force is 0, then the total momentum (of all the parts added up) will never change. The momentum might redistribute itself, but the sum is a constant.

3.

Momentum and conservation of momentum are consequences of N-II and N-III and give us a powerful new way of thinking about interactions. We’ll talk more about them in the next lecture.

Essential Reading:

Hewitt, chapter 5. Hobson, end of chapter 4.

Thinkwell

, “5: Momentum and Its Conservation.”


Gonick, chapter 8.


When your coffee cup sits on the table, the table exerts an upward force on the cup. Why doesn’t it accelerate upward? N-III says that there must be an equal and opposite force to the force of the table on the cup. What is that partner force? What does it act on?

2.

Identify the equal and opposite force pairs in the following situations: You walk forward. A kayaker paddles. You get hit with a snowball. Your pen falls to the floor. Your pen strikes the floor after falling. (There might be more than one pair relevant in some examples, but for every force of “A on B,” you need to come up with the equal and opposite force of “B on A.”)

3.

A donkey is attached to a cart. The donkey, who is pretty smart for a donkey (but doesn’t yet fully grasp Newton’s laws), says, “If I pull on the cart, the cart will pull

equally but opposite

on me. That’s N-III. Given that those two forces are

equal and opposite

, the total force will add up to zero, and zero force means no acceleration. (That’s N-II!) Apparently, then, no acceleration means that I’ll never be able to budge the cart. It’s at rest and will remain at rest. I think I’ll just sit here and not even try.” At which point, the donkey begins chewing on a carrot. How can you convince the donkey of its incorrect application of Newton’s laws and get it to move? (No violence against animals, please. Use reason, logic, and physics only.)

4.

What is an example of a system with no external forces?



5.

If everyone in the United States jumped up at the same instant, what can you say about the total momentum of the “system” of planet Earth and all its occupants? Will the Earth “jerk” or not? (Would it be easily noticeable?)



Lecture Ten Conservation of Momentum

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

—Albert Einstein

Scope:

Introducing the concept of momentum shifts our perspective on Newton’s laws. Without changing the underlying rules or adding anything fundamentally new, this moves our focus from force to interactions and from simple objects to systems. It allows us to broaden the scope of physics problems we can tackle. We can consider solid objects that can rotate, twist, even change shape, and we can examine questions of stability versus dynamism. The result is the Newtonian worldview—the universe as a deterministic clockwork, based on only a few basic underlying and unified principles.

Outline

I.

If you think of N-II as

F

=

ma

, you tend to focus on one object and how it behaves. When you instead think of N-II and N-III in terms of momentum, you tend to “zoom out” to larger systems.

A.

Because forces always come in pairs, you can zoom out to find a larger system with no net external force on it.

B.

Momentum shifts how you think about force. Force causes a rate of change of momentum.

1.

Why does an air bag protect you? Your forward momentum will quickly change to zero in a crash. The air bag slightly increases the time for that change to take place—instead of the dashboard stopping you almost instantly, the bag “spreads out” the

time

over which you slow down.

2.

More time means a lower rate of change; if the momentum changes more slowly, the force is smaller. It’s enough to save your life!

C.

Conservation of momentum does not mean that the momentum “here, of this thing” stays the same forever.

1.

Instead, the idea of conservation means that the total sum of momenta, added together, of all parts, is a constant as time goes by.

2.

Think of billiard balls knocking into each other; one stops, but the other starts. Momentum is conserved overall for the

system

, not for each ball separately.

D.

Consider a firecracker initially at rest on an ice rink. When it explodes, imagine two identical back-to-back pieces go flying apart.

1.

The system had no velocity to start, and because

mv

= 0, there is no momentum to start with.

2.

The exploding forces are all internal—no outside force acts on the firecracker; thus, momentum must be conserved.

3.

The two back-to-back pieces have equal and opposite momenta. The total momentum of this system is still 0.

4.

Momenta can cancel out just as easily as adding up, because they have a direction (equal forward and backward momenta add up to zero).

II.

Conservation of momentum is helpful in situations that seem too complicated to fruitfully apply Newton’s law directly, for example, with sudden or large internal forces.

A.

In the firecracker example above, the internal exploding forces are complicated and hard to quantify. Still, we can draw some clear conclusions.

1.

If a firework was launched and didn’t explode, it would follow a simple parabolic arc as it fell to the ground.

2.

If the firework exploded into pieces, we know what that pattern looks like, and in fact, that recognizable pattern is a direct result of conservation of momentum.

3.

That’s why firework displays look so uniformly distributed. No designer can predict

exactly

how the display will look, but they do know the general character of the result.

4.

Returning to our firecracker on the ice rink, suppose it explodes into two pieces, one more massive than the other. Momentum must be conserved, meaning that the momentum of the massive piece must be the same—equal and opposite—that of the less massive piece. But remember, momentum =

mv

.



Thus, to conserve momentum, the more massive piece will have a lower velocity than the less massive piece.

5.

If you couldn’t tell which piece was heavy and which was light, it might appear that momentum wasn’t conserved (one piece moves away faster), but their oomph would be the same and in opposite directions—guaranteed!

6.

When a little soccer player hits a bigger one, conservation of momentum can be very important—the little player goes flying!

B.

Think of a car crashing into a stopped vehicle at an intersection. How do the police determine if the incoming car was speeding?

1.

The crash involves complex internal forces that are hard to understand or characterize. Is it hopeless to try to analyze it?

2.

There are two things going on in a crash of this kind: There’s the crash itself and the resulting skid when the two cars (now stuck together) slide across the intersection. An external force, friction, ultimately slows the wreck to a halt.

3.

By looking at the skid marks, the police can determine the velocity of the wreck (the hulk of the two cars stuck together) after the crash took place. Knowing this velocity and the mass of the wreck allows the police to use conservation of momentum to determine the speed of the incoming car as it hit the stopped car.

III.

Conservation of momentum leads us to think about complex systems in a way that is ultimately as simple as point objects were.

A.

The

center of mass

is the key to allowing us to think about complex systems in this way. The center of mass tells you

effectively

where the mass in an object is located.

1.

For a symmetric object, that’s literally at the center.

2.

For a human body, the center of mass is determined by the weighted average of the locations of all the mass. In this case, the center of mass is somewhere behind your belly button.

3.

If you reach forward, you move some of your mass in front of you, and your center of mass will shift forward. You can even shift your center of mass outside your body if you bend over into an arch.

4.

If you follow the center of mass of your body, it obeys Newton’s laws just as simply as a point would.

B.

Consider a canoe in open water. Let’s neglect the friction of water with the canoe. You are sitting at one end, and the momentum of the system starts at zero.

1.

The center of mass of the system is not in the middle of the boat. It’s shifted a bit toward the end where you are sitting because

you

have a lot of mass.

2.

If you crawl toward the other end, you now have momentum. The canoe must move opposite you so that total momentum of the system is conserved (zero, the whole time!).

3.

The canoe has moved, and so have you, but there was never any external force on the system. The system was at rest, and it remained at rest. Thus, the center of mass of the system never moved with respect to the world.

4.

You moved in one direction and the canoe moved in the other direction, but the center of mass of you and the canoe as a system was always fixed.

5.

To a physicist, you might say nothing happened in this system, despite its internal complexity.

C.

The bottom line is that focusing on the center of mass of a real object simplifies the story enormously.

IV.

Rotations around the center of mass are one last critical additional piece of the story for describing complex motion.

A.

Recall the idea of superposition that we talked about with Galileo. If you think about a key ring flying through the air, it has both sideways motion and up-and-down motion. When you superpose these two motions, the result is a slightly more complicated motion, the arc. An Olympic high diver has the same motion. Now let’s think about superposing yet another motion on that arc, which might be the high diver rotating around his or her center of mass.

B.

Rotational motion is still just motion, and Newton’s laws can be used to explain and predict all kinds of motion. We can always break complex motion down into various pieces.



C.

Let’s think of simple rotational motion, such as a bicycle wheel rotating around its axle. Focusing on just the spinning wheel, not the forward motion of the bicycle, we would see that the motion is not as complex as it originally seemed.

D.

How fast is the wheel spinning? In other words, what would be the kinematics of this rotating object? It might, for example, move through 90 degrees of rotation every second and, thus, would take 4 seconds for a complete rotation. Note, however, that nothing is happening to the center of mass of the bicycle wheel.

E.

In the same way, we could break down the motion of the high diver into rotations in three different spatial dimensions.

F.

In analogy with momentum of an object moving along a straight line (

linear momentum

), we have

angular momentum

of a spinning object.

1.

A bike wheel on a rack, spinning but going nowhere, has no linear momentum but has plenty of angular momentum.

2.

Angular momentum is also conserved; in the absence of any outside “twists” (called

torques

), that bike wheel will keep on spinning.

G.

Concentrating on the center of mass allows us to use Newton’s laws to reduce complex systems back to point-like, simple objects.

V.

We’ll close by briefly mentioning one other piece in this story that moves from simplicity to complexity, which is

stability

.

A.

When you’re standing in place, how do you prevent yourself from tipping over? The answer can be found in

F

=

ma

. You must apply forces to your body in such a way that your center of mass doesn’t accelerate in any direction. Of course, nature takes care of preventing up-and-down motion, and you use your muscles to keep yourself from tipping forward or backward.

B.

When you build a building, you don’t want it to acquire momentum when the wind blows. You want it to be stable.

C.

When you build a porch, you don’t want it to tip over (to acquire angular momentum!) when you stand at the edge. Again, you want it to be stable.

D.

Static equilibrium

is the buzzword here and has many practical applications. It’s a direct application of Newton’s laws: designing things so that the net force on (and torque or twist around) the center of mass will stay zero.

E.

In future lectures, we’ll begin to look at other combinations of mechanical quantities, similar to momentum (

mv

), that will allow us to explore ever-more complex systems but still work our way back down to Newton’s laws.

Essential Reading:

Hewitt, chapter 7. March, end of chapter 2.

Thinkwell

, “7: Physics of Extended Objects” (particularly systems and center of mass, though you can go on to see as much as you’re interested in).

Recommended Computer Sim:

Many Web sites have good collections of physics applets. For example:

1.

www.walter-fendt.de/ph11e. Go to Lever Principle if you’d like to explore statics. (To add a mass, click on the sim and slide the mouse until the new mass “hooks.”) What is the condition for balance? Do you have to have the same mass on both sides, or is there some other principle involved?

2.

http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/semester1. Scroll down to Center of Mass (in the left frame), and click on Motion with no external force. You will see a simulation of the person moving in the canoe discussed in this lecture. Look at the symbols at the bottom; there is a center of mass of the system but also a center of mass of the canoe alone and a center of mass of the person alone. Can you make sense of what’s happening and relate it back to conservation of overall momentum? Explore more applets at this site; there are many nice ones!




Gonick, chapters 10–11.


Explain, using Newton’s laws, how and why seatbelts help protect you in a crash.

2.

When playing pool, the first shot is a single cue ball smacking into 15 target balls (all initially at rest, touching one another, in a triangular pattern). Imagine, for simplicity, that the pool table had no walls or ends (it’s a very large table!). Describe the motion of the center of mass of the system (all 16 balls, target plus cue) before the cue ball reaches the target. After?

3.

If two cars collide and one is initially at rest, is it possible for both to be at rest

immediately

after the collision? If so, explain how this might occur and how it is consistent with Newton’s laws and conservation of momentum.

4.

Is conservation of momentum still exactly true if there are internal frictional forces involved, or can internal friction “reduce” momentum of a system in some way?

5.

How can you use a simple balloon to demonstrate the physics of rocket propulsion?

6.

Angular momentum involves one extra thing we didn’t discuss, the distribution of mass. If you shift mass close to the center (keeping the rotational speed constant), you have less angular momentum. Use this idea to explain how an ice skater can “speed up” a spin just by pulling his or her arms in. (It’s a very dramatic and elegant demonstration/use of conservation of angular momentum!)

7.

Two basketball players jump with the same upward velocity. Is there any possible way that one of them can have a longer “hang time” than the other? (Or is “long hang time” an optical illusion, based on watching some part of the body other than the center of mass?)

8.

Stand with your heels against a wall and try to touch your toes without bending your knees or moving your feet. Only a small fraction of people can accomplish this task without falling over. What’s the physics involved? (Where is your center of mass in relation to your feet?)



Lecture Eleven Beyond Newton—Work and Energy

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

—Albert Einstein

Energy and persistence conquer all things.

—Benjamin Franklin

Scope:

Isaac Newton thought of the world in terms of momentum and flow of momentum. A similar (but subtly different) perspective began to develop about 100 years after Newton and gained popularity as it became clear that it was enormously beneficial in making sense of real-life phenomena. This perspective involves thinking about energy and power, that is, the rate of flow of energy. Energy is a more abstract concept than force—you can’t “touch” it in the same way—but our intuitions about energy will serve us well. This concept forms the basis of understanding practically everything, from chemistry and biology to geology and engineering. In this lecture, we introduce the ideas of work and energy to make sense of this new way of thinking about the world.

Outline

I.

Energy is a central, critical idea in classical physics that moves us beyond strictly Newtonian ideas.

A.

The energy concept is used by scientists all the time. It’s more robust and productive than the concept of forces. Biologists, chemists, and environmental engineers, not to mention politicians and homeowners paying their electric bills, care more about energy than force.

B.

Energy is a property of systems. Unlike force, energy can be quantified with a number. Energy can change form and move from one system or object to another.

C.

Thinking about the flow of energy is a powerful organizing tool for thinking about complex systems and interactions quite differently from force and motion.

II.

It’s a little tricky to define

energy

in a simple, global way. Like many physics words, it is not used in exactly the same way as it is in standard or casual English.

A.

We’ll start with a closely related topic,

work

, which will lead us quite directly to the idea of energy. Work is yet another English word that we must define carefully.

B.

Work is a measure of what happens when a force

does

something, when it moves a body through a distance.

1.

Pushing a lawnmower (applying a force) requires work, as opposed to just leaning on a lawnmower which doesn't move.

2.

The harder you push, the more work you do. In addition, the

farther

it goes, the more work you do. Thus, we define

work

to be the product of force (how hard you push) and distance traveled. In other words, work equals force times distance.

3.

It’s difficult to hold a stack of heavy books in your hand, but according to our definition, no work is being done; although you’re applying a force, the books are not being

moved

through any distance.

4.

Technically, your muscles constantly twitch to hold up the books, so some “micro movement” is going on and, thus, some work. That’s part of why the formal definition of

work

sometimes disagrees with our casual common sense.

C.

Work is measured in units of force times distance. In the metric system, a force of 1 newton moving something 1 meter is called 1

joule

of work (named after James Joule, whom we’ll talk about in future lectures). Lifting an apple gently up a few feet is about 1 joule’s worth of work.

III.

Energy is a number that characterizes a thing’s capacity to do work. How much work you can do depends on how much energy you have.



A.

When you do work, you are transferring energy mechanically. When you push a lawnmower, for example, energy is flowing from you to the mower (and, ultimately, into heating up the lawn).

B.

Energy, too, is measured in joules. If you have 1 joule of energy, it means you could, in principle, do 1 joule’s worth of work.

C.

When a moving object, such as a swinging golf club, strikes a stationary object, such as a ball, a force is applied, and the struck object will move; in other words, work will be done.

1.

Using Newton’s laws, which tell us how force causes acceleration (which, in turn, changes velocity, which tells us how fast we’re going and, therefore, how far we go in a given time...!), we can work out precisely how much energy a moving object has.

2.

The faster an object is moving and the more massive it is, the more work it will be able to do in a collision, such as the one between the golf club and the ball.

3.

The result is called

kinetic energy

, or

energy of motion

. This is the energy an object contains just by virtue of the fact that it’s moving. Any moving object can, in principle, do work. All that matters is mass and velocity.

D.

The formula for kinetic energy is (

½

)

mv

2

.

1.

This formula looks a bit like the one for momentum (

mv

), but the velocity enters twice. If the speed is doubled, more than twice the work can be performed. In fact, the result is four times the amount of work.

2.

Note that there is no direction associated with energy.

3.

A car going 55 mph has a certain amount of kinetic energy. Raising the speed to 75 does

not

double the speed, but it very nearly doubles the energy (try this on your calculator). When the U.S. government lowered speed limits from 75 to 55 many years ago, fatalities were dramatically reduced. A relatively small difference in speed makes a big difference in available energy!

4.

Interestingly, the speed limit was lowered, not to save lives, but to save gas. Think about the logic of this situation in reverse: A car at rest has no kinetic energy. Pushing on the gas pedal transfers energy from the gas itself to energy of motion, that is, moving the car forward. To go from 0 to 55 mph requires a certain amount of energy: (

½

)

mv

2

; to go from 0 to 75 mph requires almost double the energy.

IV.

Kinetic energy is just one way that energy can be “stored.”

A.

Potential energy

is the name for a different form of energy. Consider, again, a ring of keys tossed straight up in the air.

1.

When you toss the key ring, you apply an upward force for a brief period. During that period, your hand is pushing the key ring and the key ring is responding. You did work on the key ring and, thus, you transferred kinetic energy to it.

2.

As the key ring climbs, it slows down (because of gravity). At the top of its path, it’s instantaneously at rest. Its kinetic energy is gone. Where did it go?

3.

The energy has changed forms. Now, the energy is in the form of

gravitational

potential energy

. The Earth

−

key ring system has stored up the original energy.

4.

All the energy is still there, and we can get it all back just by letting the key ring fall back down again. When it reaches the starting point, it has the same ability to do work that it started with.

5.

Again, the potential energy could be calculated, just as kinetic energy can be calculated. In this case, gravitational potential energy is directly proportional to mass and height (i.e., distance from the Earth).

B.

There are many different kinds of energy.

1.

Squeezing a spring stores

spring potential energy

. Children’s toys often make use of this form of stored energy. As the toy sits on the floor, wound up, there is no motion. It doesn’t have gravitational energy (it’s on the floor), but it has spring potential energy, and when you let it go, it will do work (applying a force, moving something through a distance).

2.

A can of gasoline has stored

chemical potential energy

. You might think of the chemical bonds as little coiled springs. Lots of energy is available in the gasoline, which can do work at a later time.

3.

Hot water has stored

thermal energy

. The hotter the water is, the more energy it has. Here, the energy is hidden in the kinetic energy of the individual molecules.

V.

Energy flows, but the total amount for any isolated system is conserved.



A.

Energy can flow from body to body or from form to form.

1.

An example of body-to-body energy flow can be seen in the golf club striking the golf ball: The kinetic energy of the golf club converts to kinetic energy of the golf ball.

2.

The same example shows form-to-form energy flow: The kinetic energy of the golf ball is converted into gravitational potential energy as the ball rises into the air.

3.

The energy of the golf ball also turns into thermal energy when it smashes into the ground and stops (slightly heating both the ground and the ball).

4.

In all these processes, however, energy is conserved; the amount of energy that an isolated system starts with may transfer, but it doesn’t change in overall amount.

B.

The flow of energy characterizes all processes in the universe. It’s another way of thinking about physics; rather than “pushes and pulls,” we can think of work and energy transfer.

1.

For many reasons, biologists might prefer not to think about the forces on cells. Rather, they find it easier to think about the fuel for the cell that stores chemical energy, the amount and rate at which it transfers to other parts of the cell, and so on.

2.

The power station designer might prefer not to think about the pushes and pulls on gears at the plant (or electrons in your house). Rather, he or she might find it easier to think about the energy in the coal, the transfer into kinetic energy of spinning turbines, the flow of energy (in the form of electrical energy) to your home, the conversion into electromagnetic energy (light!) in your light bulbs, and so on.

C.

What is so important about energy? In part, it’s the fact that it’s so simple (just a pure number) and that it is conserved.

1.

Remember that you can’t get more energy out of a system than you put in. Don’t waste your money on a perpetual motion (“free energy”) scam that claims to give useful work without requiring an input of energy.

2.

Imagine trying to predict the speed of a roller-coaster car at some point along the track using Newton’s laws. This would be a tedious and challenging math problem because you’d need to know the forces (and their directions) at every point along the way. In contrast, the principle of conservation of energy tells us the answer right away: The starting gravitational potential energy will be transferred to kinetic energy at the bottom of the hill.

3.

With Newton’s laws, we think about individual objects and the forces on them. In thinking about energy, we step back and take a more holistic view.

4.

The flow of energy is a fresh perspective that allows very complex systems and problems to be analyzed and understood quickly and simply. We will come back to this concept many times in future lectures.


Go to http://phet.colorado.edu, and play with Energy Skate Park. You can change the shape of the track or the strength of gravity. Use the Bar Chart option to try to keep track of the different forms of energy; then, you can go back to the Ramp. (There are buttons to let you view graphs of energy, as well as buttons to see bar charts of these.) Can you make sense of the results? Take your time, and try a few scenarios. It’s probably best to turn off friction, at least at first.

Essential Reading:

Hewitt, start of chapter 6. Hobson, start of chapter 6. March, chapter 5.

Thinkwell

, “4: Energy,” particularly the introduction to “Work” and the introduction to “Conservation of Energy.”


Lightman, chapter 1.

Feynman Lectures

, vol. 1, start of chapter 4. Cropper, chapter 4.



Gonick, chapter 9.


In what ways is the physicist’s definition of

work

the same as, and different from, common English-language usage of that word? Give three different examples of

work

that you have done this week using the physics definition. How about the term

energy

? In what ways do we use this term in normal speech that differ from, or agree with, the physicist’s definition?

2.

A jelly donut has about 1 million joules of stored chemical energy in it. If you climb a mountain to “work off” that donut, how high do you have to go? (Gravitational potential energy is given by

m

×

g

×

h

, where

m

is your mass [in kg],

g

is the acceleration due to gravity [9.8 meters per second per second], and

h

is the height in meters.) What does this tell you about the “efficiency” your body has in terms of converting chemical energy?

3.

Using the formula (

½

)

mv

2

, estimate the kinetic energy of your car, driving at 60 miles/hr on the highway (that’s about 100 km/hr, and 1 hr = 3600 sec). The total stored chemical energy in one gallon of gasoline is about 130 million joules. How much gas do you burn just to get the car up to speed? (Neglect friction and car efficiency. Then consider that typical car engines are about 20% efficient in ideal conditions.)

4.

Trace the flow and conversion of energy (from form to form) involved when you throw a ball straight up in the air, from throw to catch. Where does the energy end up? How about when you push a lawnmower across the lawn? When you turn on the toaster in your house? (For this case, start right at the beginning, from nuclear fusion in the Sun that converts stored nuclear energy into electromagnetic energy in the form of sunlight.)

5.

Does the Sun do “work” on the Earth as the Earth goes around in its orbit? (We have been a little crude in our definition of

work

. I said it was force

×

distance, but more carefully, it is only the part of the force

parallel

to the distance moved that counts.)



Lecture Twelve Power and the Newtonian Synthesis

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, “These are the conditions, now what happens next?”

—Richard Feynman

Scope:

Thinking about physics in terms of energy and the flow of energy is a reformulation of Newtonian physics. It’s not so much something new itself as a more novel perspective. The concept that energy can move from place to place and change forms helps us to understand how and why things behave as they do. The rate at which energy flows from one system to another (the

power

) tells us even more. These concepts then form the basis of understanding practically everything, from chemistry and biology to geology and engineering. We conclude this lecture by summarizing where we’ve been and where we’re heading. Newtonian philosophy, that is, the experimental methodologies and the underlying realism, determinism, and ultimate simplicity, permeates classical physics questions. The world of classical physics is mechanical. The big ideas developed so far, particularly the ideas of force, matter, and energy; time and space; and conservation laws, allow us to tackle a broad scope of questions, which will be the subject of future lectures. Amazingly, none of these ideas has survived

completely

unscathed into modern physics, but they still form a

practical

foundation for our understanding of physics.

Outline

I.

The rate at which energy flows is often important to think about. It can determine, for example, whether a cell in your body is functioning correctly or is sick. Physicists use the term

power

for the rate of energy flow: the amount of energy transferred divided by the time taken for the transfer.

A.

It’s easy to confuse power and energy, just as it’s easy to confuse a thing and the rate of change of that thing. We’ve seen this distinction earlier with velocity and acceleration (acceleration equals the rate at which velocity is changing) and with momentum and force (force equals the rate at which momentum is changing). Power tells us how rapidly energy is flowing, not how much energy we have.

1.

Think of a bucket of water with a hole in the bottom. Two quantities are involved in this system: the amount of water in the bucket and how fast it is pouring out.

2.

At any given moment in time, knowing one of these quantities tells us nothing at all about the other. Over time, however, the rate of change has an effect on how much water is in the bucket.

B.

Climbing up stairs requires a certain amount of energy. That is a fixed number, no matter how fast or how slow you go up the stairs. But the power demanded will depend on how fast you go, because power is energy divided by time taken.

1.

The

energy

is determined by your mass and how high the stairs are. That’s it—gravitational potential energy depends only on how high you lift something.

2.

The

power

is energy used per second (or per minute or per hour). If you go up quickly, that is, in a short time, the power required will be high. If you go up slowly, the power requirement is smaller.

C.

We measure power in units of joules per second. In the metric system, 1 joule/sec is called a

watt

, named after James Watt (1736–1819), inventor of the steam engine.

1.

A 100-watt light bulb converts 100 joules of electric energy every second (into both light and heat energy).

2.

You pay the electric company for energy used, not for power.

3.

The new compact fluorescent light bulbs rated at 20 watts may be just as bright as a conventional 100-watt bulb because the old-style bulb puts out most of its energy in the form of heat.

4.

A 20-watt bulb costs five times less each second that it’s on than a 100-watt bulb. It converts five times less energy each second. If you leave the 20-watt bulb on for five hours but the 100-watt bulb for only one hour, the cost will be the same.

D.

A car speeding up to highway speeds might convert around 100,000 joules of stored chemical energy (from the gasoline) into kinetic energy of motion of the car every second.



1.

Horsepower

is the English unit of power. A big car might be rated at 150 hp, which would be roughly 100,000 watts.

2.

Gasoline has enormous chemical potential energy stored in it. One gallon of gas, if converted completely, can generate over 100

million

joules.

II.

Issues of energy (and the environment) can be complicated, but the bottom line often amounts to understanding energy and the rate at which energy is transferred.

A.

Conservation of energy means something different to a physicist and an environmentalist.

1.

For a physicist, the total amount of energy in the universe is conserved; it never changes. The same is true for any isolated system. That’s the

conservation of energy

we’ve been discussing.

2.

For the environmentalist, conserving energy refers more to how efficiently energy is converted from one form to another.

B.

As mentioned earlier, energy is stored in different forms. Chemical potential energy of fossil fuels is

high-quality energy

, meaning that it can easily be converted into other useful forms of energy, such as energy of motion (to move cars or drive pistons). Electrical energy is even higher quality.

C.

The Earth is not an isolated system; we have a steady source of energy input from the Sun. It is relatively easy to convert this energy into thermal energy but more difficult to convert it into energy of motion.

III.

At this halfway point in the lectures, let’s summarize the big ideas we’ve covered so far; these include many of the basic “rules of the game,” the underlying principles of classical physics.

A.

At the “micro” level, we set up Newtonian ideas about how to understand the behavior of physical objects.

1.

We started with kinematics, the description of motion. Knowing kinematics means that we can describe how things move in exquisite detail.

2.

Newton’s laws provided the dynamics, that is, an explanation of the causes of motion. In particular,

F

=

ma

tells us the causes of motion. Why does the motion of something change? The answer: because a force is applied to it.

B.

At a slightly more macro level, we started thinking about momentum, a measurable property of objects and systems, defined in terms of observable (kinematic) quantities.

1.

Newton’s laws can be reformulated in terms of momentum to tell us two key facts: If a system is isolated, total momentum is conserved. If it is not isolated, force results in a known rate of change of momentum.

2.

Momentum conservation is a powerful tool to simplify analysis and understanding of situations in which isolated systems experience significant, complex internal forces but no outside forces, such as collisions and explosions.

3.

Momentum conservation also allows us to simplify analysis in the sense of focusing on the center of mass, which continues to behave like a simple particle.

C.

At a still more macro level, the introduction of the concepts of work and energy lets us step even further back and think about the behavior and interactions of complex systems.

1.

Energy is a different measurable property of objects and systems, defined as the maximum amount of work which can be done. We also defined

work

in terms of force and distance.

2.

Energy is easier to work with than momentum because it’s just a number; it has no direction.

D.

When

we

began this course, I said that we would be thinking about space and time, matter and energy, and force and motion. We now see that these are not isolated ideas; in physics, we combine these basic ideas in different ways.

E.

At this point, we can productively think about a huge spectrum of physical phenomena and describe, explain, understand, and predict them quantitatively. As the course goes on, we’ll look at some other areas of physics, including electricity and magnetism, thermal properties of materials, light, and sound.

F.

On a more philosophical level, we’ve seen that classical physics has a mechanical worldview: The universe is like a giant clock, a huge, complicated mechanical system, operating with fundamentally simple and comprehensible rules.

1.

The classical worldview is deterministic: Knowing the “rules of the game” allows us to predict all physical behavior.



2.

The classical outlook is also reductionist: There is a simple underlying story, and all the beauty and complexity of our seemingly magical world is understandable and derivable by considering smaller, simpler components.

G.

We have focused so far on the basic principles of physics, and we still have many developments and details to consider. As we’ll see, however, our knowledge of electricity, magnetism, light, and other topics will be built from this synthesis—this classical physics set of ideas—that we have examined so far.

Essential Reading:

Hewitt, end of chapter 6. Hobson, end of chapter 6.

Thinkwell

, “4: Energy” (especially “Conservation of Energy in General”).


Cropper, chapter 5.


Look at your electric bill; figure out how much energy you used in the last month (in joules) and what your average power consumption was (in watts, which is joules/sec). How could you reduce these numbers? How could we, collectively, as a society, help? (What will happen if we don’t?)

2.

Two cross-country skiers climb the same mountain from two different sides. One side is very steep; the other is much less so. Both start at the same height and end at the top. If they take the same total time (they “tie”), which has done more work? Which required more power? What about if the one going up the steep side went faster and won? (Neglect human efficiency and work lost to friction for this scenario.)

3.

You want to lift a washer/dryer up to a second-story apartment and can choose between hauling it straight up with a rope that runs over a good, low-friction pulley or pushing it up a ramp with good, low-friction rollers. Compare the total work done in both cases. Which requires more force? If you take the same time either way, which way requires more power?

4.

Do you agree that the universe is fully deterministic? What does that say about human free will? Even if the laws of physics are fully deterministic, are there any practical limits to our predictive powers?

5.

Do you agree that complex behavior of a system can always be understood in terms of the underlying parts and rules that govern the system? In other words, do you believe in reductionism? In all cases or just some? What are the limits of such a philosophy?

6.

Does learning about the principles of classical physics make you want to learn more about it, or are you more interested in moving on to the more esoteric ideas of modern physics? (Or are you now ready to shift your focus to philosophy, history, religion, art...?)

7.

In what ways did the shift to a classical scientific worldview (with its underlying realistic, deterministic, and reductionistic philosophical roots) influence non-scientific aspects of the world of the 1700s? Think in particular about the development of the American political system, shifts in religious power and influence, the world of art and music, and so on.



Timeline

c. 500 B.C.........................Pythagoras founds his school on Samos. It holds as a basic belief that reality is fundamentally mathematical in nature. 384–322 B.C.....................The life of Aristotle, whose model for the motion of bodies was the standard for European science for almost 1500 years. c. 150................................Ptolemy proposes the “epicycle” model of planetary motion in the

Almagest

, which stands, along with Aristotelian physics, through the Middle Ages. 1543..................................Nicolaus Copernicus publishes

On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres

, the culmination of his heliocentric theory. He proposes an alternative to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, placing the Sun at the center, rather than the Earth. His work is very careful to steer clear of confrontation and controversy, avoiding censorship by the Church. Copernicus receives one of the first printed copies on his deathbed. 1570..................................Tycho Brahe constructs his observatory at Hven, which collects the data that Johannes Kepler uses to formulate his three laws of planetary motion. These data, predating the use of telescopes for astronomical observations, are of unprecedented breadth and precision. 1619..................................Kepler publishes

Harmonices Mundi

, which puts forth his three famous laws. These laws were deduced from reams of data collected over many years by Brahe, combined with years of intensive work and tremendous insight into geometry and mathematics. 1632..................................Galileo writes

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

, in which he attacks both Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy. His tone is confrontational—the Church-backed Aristotelian and Ptolemaic models are given voice in this “dialogue” by the pedantic dullard Simplicio. Galileo is called to trial on suspicion of heresy, put under house arrest, and forced to recant the views put forth in

Dialogue

and refrain from further publishing for the rest of his life. 1669..................................Isaac Newton is made a fellow of Trinity College. He immediately begins research on the subject of optics, including reflection and refraction and their practical application to telescopes. 1679–1687........................Newton begins studying mechanics, primarily focused on gravity and orbital motion. This work culminates when he publishes the

Principia

in July of 1687, which lays out the groundwork of modern physics in his three laws. These would survive essentially unaltered for 200 years. Newton also lays out the law of gravitation, which successfully predicts and explains Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. Newton develops the mathematics of calculus (though Gottfried Leibniz developed calculus independently at the same time and began publishing his results sooner). 1696..................................Newton takes up a post as warden of the Royal Mint and is promoted to Master of the Mint upon his supervisor’s death in 1699. He would do relatively little physics for the rest of his life. 1714..................................Leibniz develops a mathematics of motion based on energy, rather than momentum. His work is largely buried under nationalistic concerns (Descartes in France and Newton in England both focused on momentum), but later problems prove much easier to solve using the idea of conservation of energy; thus, both momentum and energy were eventually adopted as complementary approaches. 1733..................................Charles du Fay determines that electrical charge appears to come in two flavors, “vitreous” and “resinous,” later renamed to

positive

and

negative

. He also finds that any substance could be charged by heating or rubbing it, except for metals and soft/liquid bodies. Furthermore, he discovered the basic rule of electrostatics: Like-charged bodies repel; oppositely charged bodies attract.



1742..................................Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, proposes a new scale for temperature based on the freezing and boiling points of water. 1750..................................After proposing that du Fay’s “vitreous” and “resinous” fluids are not, in fact, separate, but really separate manifestations of the same fluid (a step in developing what we now understand as electric charge), Benjamin Franklin proposes his famous kite experiment, to prove that lightning storms are caused by electrical forces. 1757..................................James Watt creates his steam engine, offering a considerable increase in efficiency over previous models. It is the industrial drive to seek ever more powerful and efficient heat engines that pushes much of the study of thermodynamics through the 19

th

century. 1779–1783........................Antoine Lavoisier isolates and identifies the element oxygen. He then uses this to debunk the phlogiston theory of combustion. Lavoisier goes on to propose the law of conservation of mass. 1785..................................Charles Coulomb proposes an inverse-squared law for electric force and proves his theory by careful use of torsion balance (basically a spring scale). The unit for charge is named in his honor. He also determines some of the relationships of forces between magnetic poles but categorically refuses to accept the idea that any connection between electric and magnetic forces could exist. 1788..................................Joseph Lagrange develops Lagrangian mechanics as the culmination of work over 16 years to simplify formulas and ease calculations. He is arguably the greatest mathematician of the 18

th

century, who made his claim to fame based on his work on wave propagation and analytical mechanics, both of which are extremely useful to physics. 1798..................................Henry Cavendish determines the mass of the Earth and, by doing so, calculates Newton’s gravitational constant,

g

. (He did this through the use of a delicate apparatus developed by John Michell, who died and left the instrument to Cavendish.) 1800..................................Alessandro Volta invents the prototype battery (the

voltaic pile

). Prior to this development, all charge used for experimentation came from

Leyden jars

—capacitors that could provide a burst of electrical current. Volta’s voltaic pile allowed the study of steady electrical currents. 1800..................................John Dalton becomes secretary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, through which he eventually publishes his atomic theory: All matter is made out of small, indivisible atoms. 1801..................................Thomas Young conducts his double-slit experiment. A beam of light is passed through two narrow slits, creating a diffraction pattern on a screen behind the slits. This is strong evidence for the wave nature of light. 1811..................................Amadeus Avogadro proposes Avogadro’s law: that containers (at the same temperature and pressure) of different gases contain the same number of molecules, regardless of the chemical or physical properties of the gases. 1819..................................Hans Oersted discovers (possibly by accident, while preparing for a public lecture) that a wire carrying a current will divert a compass needle. This discovery provides the starting point for discovering the connections between electric and magnetic forces that would ultimately culminate in James Maxwell’s work. 1820–1826........................Andre Ampere develops the mathematical representation describing the Oersted discovery. This representation explains magnetism as resulting from the motion of many small charges. 1821–1831........................Michael Faraday discovers the dynamo principle and demonstrates electromagnetic induction. Toward the end of this time, he begins to finalize the idea of a field—a concept whose mathematical expression would culminate in Maxwell’s equations.



1824..................................Sadi Carnot formulates the idea of the

Carnot engine

, a steam engine of theoretically ideal efficiency. He uses this as a thought experiment to prove that temperature is the most important variable in an engine, not the material or specific construction details. c. 1845..............................Henry Joule discovers and refines the principle that comes to be known as

Joule’s law

— the conversion of mechanical work to thermal energy. In this year, Faraday also begins corresponding with William Thomson, who begins the initial efforts on mathematically expressing the ideas of Faraday’s fields before passing the project along to Maxwell. 1847..................................Hermann von Helmholtz proposes the law of conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics, as a development of medical studies of muscles. He expands this, connecting heat, motion, magnetism, and electricity as various forms of energy. 1861–1868........................James Clerk Maxwell unifies electricity and magnetism in a series of papers and proposes the electromagnetic nature of light. c. 1881..............................Heinrich Hertz experimentally shows the existence of electromagnetic waves, providing the basis for radio technology, as well as proving Maxwell’s equations. 1882..................................J. Willard Gibbs begins publishing his work on statistical mechanics. 1884..................................Ludwig Boltzmann develops a theory of blackbody radiation, deriving from statistical arguments the empirical relationship that had been discovered by Josef Stefan. He independently develops much of the same theories that Gibbs did. 1900..................................Max Planck publishes his theory of blackbody radiation. He builds strongly off of Bolztmann’s statistical physics but introduces the requirement that the energy of photons must be contained in discrete bundles. 1905..................................Albert Einstein’s “Miracle Year.” He publishes three papers, any one of which would be enough to cement his place in science. All three in a single year make him a name for the ages and demarcate the end of the era of classical physics and the start of modern physics.



Glossary

AC (alternating current)

: Electrons in a circuit oscillate back and forth instead of flowing (compared with DC, or direct current).

acceleration

: The rate of change in velocity; defined as change in velocity divided by time passed. Because velocity is a vector, so is acceleration (and we

can

have acceleration at constant speed if the

direction

of velocity changes!).

acoustics

: The branch of physics that studies sound.

action at a distance

: A property of many early theories (including Newton’s theory of gravity or Coulomb’s electric force law) stating that distant objects affect each other.

amp or ampere

: The metric unit of current; it indicates the number of coulombs flowing past a given point each second.

angular momentum

:

A quantitative measure of how rapidly objects are turning coupled with how massive they are and how that mass is distributed. Angular momentum is a quality of any spinning object and is conserved (provided that the object is not subject to an external “twisting force,” or torque).

angular speed

: The rate at which something is spinning; can be measured in revolutions per second or radians per second. This is related to angular momentum but without regard to the mass or distribution of mass.

arrow of time

: An abstract idea that dictates which processes are reversible, such as a billiard-ball collision, and which are irreversible, such as cracking an egg.

atom

: Originally, the fundamental (indivisible) building block of all matter. Now, the smallest building block of chemistry, an individual particle of any element. Physically, a heavy nucleus with electrons orbiting.

atomic hypothesis

: All physical matter is a composite of atoms.

battery

: A mechanical device that turns chemical energy into electrical energy; if connected to a circuit, it will drive a current at a given voltage.

Brownian motion

: The erratic motion of small but visible objects (e.g., dust) resulting from collisions with smaller (microscopic) atoms and molecules. Einstein’s quantitative description of Brownian motion was the final piece of evidence in convincing physicists of the physical reality of atoms.

caloric theory

: An early and now discredited theory of thermodynamics stating that heat is a physical fluid, rather than a transfer of energy.

center of mass

: An average position of matter in an object; the effective point where gravity (or external force) acts.

charge

: A property of all matter that determines electrical forces. Charge can be positive, negative, or neutral. Electric field lines start on positive charge and end on negative charge.

chemistry

: The study of combinations of atoms and the resulting compositions and combinations of matter.

circuit

: An electrically conducting path that can carry current in a loop.

classical physics

: Basically physics before 1900; characterized as deterministic and realistic. Classical physics includes kinematics, mechanics, optics, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, and more (acoustics, fluid dynamics,...).

conduct

: To allow charge to flow in a material. (A

resistor

still conducts, just with more resistance. The opposite of a conductor would be an insulator.)

conservation law

: The situation that exists when some quantity remains unchanged during an interaction. For example, charge conservation states that the sum of all electric charges never changes in any particle reaction. Energy conservation states that although energy may transfer from particle to particle or form to form, the total (numerical) sum remains unchanged.



constructive interference

: A defining property of waves in which two like waves add together, “building up.” Note that if they are traveling waves, they then continue without affecting each other further on.

cosmology

: The field of physics that studies the history, structure, and evolution of the universe.

coulomb

: The unit of electric charge. One coulomb of charge is a

lot

of charge! (An electron carries 1.6

×

10

−

19

coulombs.)

Coulomb’s law of static electricity

: An equation that predicts the force between any two stationary charges at a given distance. Force is proportional to

Q

1

Q

2

/distance

2

.

current

: The flow of electric charge (measured in amps).

DC (direct current)

: Electrons in a circuit flow in only one direction. (Compare with AC, or alternating current.) DC would result from a circuit with a battery; AC would result in household circuits.

degrees of freedom

: A measure of the possibilities for the shape and location of an object. More degrees of freedom offer more possibilities to move and change. For example, a particle stuck on a rod can move only back and forth, restricting its degrees of freedom. In statistical mechanics , degrees of freedom of the pieces are very important in computing the entropy of a system.

destructive interference

: A defining property of waves in which two like waves, out of phase, can cancel each other (add up positive and negative to give zero displacement) at one point.

determinism

: A philosophical belief that if all physics and the exact state of the universe could be known at any given time, then the future could be perfectly predicted.

diffraction

: The bending of light around corners.

dynamics

: The branch of physics dealing with the “why” of motion. (Newton’s laws are about dynamics of particles. Thermodynamics explains the flow of heat.) Compare with simple descriptions or, for example, kinematics.

E & M

: The field of physics that studies the fundamental forces of electricity and magnetism, their sources, and their connections.

efficiency

: Useful energy output divided by total energy input for a machine. (As we stated it in the course: “what you get” divided by “what you paid for.”)

electric field (or e-field)

: A property of a location in space that indicates the force an electric charge would feel if placed at that location.

electricity

: The forces and fields that result from the interactions of charged particles.

electromagnetic field

: Maxwell’s field that simultaneously describes electric fields and magnetic fields and their interactions. It is a unified, more universal way of thinking about electric and magnetic fields together. Light is an electromagnetic field—both electricity and magnetism are required to make sense of the phenomenon; they are intimately connected to each another.

electromagnetic wave (or EM radiation)

: The unique self-propagating wave of electric and magnetic fields. The only known wave that does

not

require any physical medium to propagate. At the right frequency range, this is commonly called

light

. At other frequencies, it includes (in increasing energy, which is also increasing frequency, but decreasing wavelength): radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, light, ultraviolet rays (UV rays), x-rays, and gamma rays.

ellipse

: A particular kind of stretched circle; the path of planets in orbit. Mathematically, one of the

conic sections

.

energy

: A measure of the amount of work (as defined by physics) that an object can do, at least in principle.

entropy

: A quantitative measure of the disorder of a thermodynamic system.

equilibrium

: A state of balance; a system or interaction of systems in which nothing macroscopic is changing.

experiment

: A controlled test or procedure, often one that compares the predictions of a theory with the behavior of the universe.



experimentalist

: A scientist who primarily devotes his or her time to creating and running experiments to better understand nature (as compared to a theorist). This is a more modern specialization/distinction; in the classical physics era, many scientists played the roles of both experimentalist and theorist.

field

: The physical manifestation of a force of nature, present throughout space. An alternative way of thinking about forces, rather than “action at a distance.”

field lines

: A visualization tool to picture how electromagnetic fields appear in the presence of sources (charges or currents). A

field line

shows which way test charges would

start

to move if released at that point (tangent to, or “along,” the field lines). Where the field lines bunch together, the forces are strongest.

force

: A push or pull on an object; this is what causes acceleration. Force has a strength and a direction. Force is the quantitative measure of interactions of objects.

force field

: The idea that a source of force produces something (a field) in all of space, whether or not there is an object there to feel it. For example, the Earth produces a

gravitational force field

around itself.

freefall

: The idealized motion of an object falling due to gravity, without air resistance or any

other

forces. (A parachutist is in true freefall only briefly: Air resistance builds up quickly, ultimately becoming just as important as gravity, at which point the parachutist falls at constant speed.)

frequency

: A measurement of how many times an object oscillates in a second; it is measured in hertz, or Hz. Thus, 60 Hz means “60 cycles each second.”

frictionless

: An approximation commonly made to simplify physics questions, in which we neglect the (often small but rarely truly zero) effects of air resistance or surface resistance to motion.

fundamental forces

: The four basic forces that cause all motion and bind together all matter; they are the gravitational force, electromagnetic force, strong force, and weak force. (The latter two are not part of the classical physics story.)

gamma rays

: High-energy EM radiation; see

electromagnetic wave

.

geocentric

(“Earth centered”): The belief that the Sun and the entire universe rotated around the Earth.

gravity

: One of the four fundamental forces. A purely attractive force generated between any two masses; it depends on the distance between the masses. Newton’s formula of universal gravity is expressed as follows: Force is proportional to

M

1

M

2

/distance

2

.

ground

: Electrical term referring to any object big enough to give or receive charge without itself becoming electrically charged; usually the Earth.

heat

: A verb describing the transfer of thermal energy into or out of a system.

heliocentric

(“Sun-centered”): The belief that the Earth, along with the rest of the solar system, revolves around the Sun.

hertz

: The unit of frequency; it indicates number of cycles per second.

inertia

: The tendency of an object in motion to remain in the same motion; also, a quantitative measure of the resistance of any object to change in its velocity (for a given force). Mass is the direct measure of inertia.

infrared radiation

: See


.

insulate

: To prevent the flow of electrons through or on a material. Many materials (wood, plastic, and so on) are good insulators. Insulators can “break down”; for example, a high-voltage source can cause a spark, which means a conducting path has been created in what was previously an insulator.

interaction

: A synonym for

force

; a way in which particles transform or perturb one another.

internal forces

: Forces between objects

inside

a system. (Distinguished from

external forces

, which arise from something

outside

a system.)

invariant

: Any property that remains unchanged over time.



kinematics

: The study of physics in which motion is described. Kinematics of particles involves the relationships among position, velocity, and acceleration over time.

kinetic energy

: The energy an object has based purely on its speed. The classical formula for kinetic energy is (1/2)

mv

2

.

law

: A fundamental theory on which many other theories are based; a pattern or relationship that is extremely well established experimentally. However, even a “law of nature” may not be true in certain limits. For example, Newton’s law of gravity must be modified in extreme situations, such as near a black hole. Newton’s second law must be modified at velocities near the speed of light or for subatomic particles.

light

: Visible electromagnetic radiation. See


.

macroscopic

: Anything of “human scale”; bigger than what can be seen with a low-powered microscope; very roughly larger than micrometers.

magnetic field (B field)

: A property of a location in space that indicates the force a moving electric charge (or a permanent magnet) would feel at that location.

magnetic poles

: The magnetic analogy to charge; the points on a magnet where the field lines enter or exit the magnet. (There are north and south magnetic poles.)

magnetism

: Another fundamental of force of nature; also, the study of magnets, currents, and the interactions among them.

mass

: A measure of how much “stuff” an object has; the measure of inertia of a body; the quantity that determines the gravitational force on an object.

matter

: A generic term for everything made of atoms (or the material components of the world). Matter has mass.

medium

: The background material that supports a wave. For example, water is the

medium

for ocean waves; air is the

medium

for sound waves.

microscopic

: Referring to a scale smaller than the human scale; invisible to the naked eye. Roughly, the molecular scale; certainly smaller than a fraction of a micrometer. Often synonymous with

atomic scale

.

model

: A simplified way of thinking about or picturing the workings of a complex system. For example, a solid object can be modeled as a number of microscopic hard spheres, connected by a grid of simple springs. A model need not always be literally correct, but it allows scientists to make predictions and understand systems.

modern physics

: Physics from 1900 until today, which primarily deals with the very small (quantum physics) and the very fast or very massive (relativity). Modern physics has branched out to include studies of particle physics, plasmas, cosmology, lasers, and much more.

molecule

: A chemical building block that is not fundamental but is built up out of a bound state of two or more atoms; for example, an H

2

O (water) molecule.

momentum

: A measurable property of objects (or systems). Related to the tendency of an object to continue in its motion; the “oomph” an object would have if it hit you. (

Force

tells you the rate at which momentum changes.) Momentum is

defined

for a particle to be mass

×

velocity.

monopole

: A beginning or end of field lines (e.g., a positive charge is always at the beginning of electric field lines). Important because no one has ever found a magnetic monopole; therefore, magnetic field lines can never begin or end—they must form loops

motion

: The description of the change in position of an object over time, measured by velocity and acceleration. “At rest” is a state of motion in which the object has zero velocity and zero acceleration; its position is not changing.

neutral objects

: Objects with equal positive and negative electric charge, thereby appearing to have no charge at all.

Newton’s second law (N-II)

: The heart of dynamics; the law of nature that says that force causes any mass to accelerate according to the formula

F

=

ma

, or as Newton would write it, force = (change in momentum)/(time



taken). The formula is a

vector equation

, meaning that the

direction

of the force tells you the

direction

of the acceleration.

nucleus

: A bound collection of protons and neutrons; the center of atoms.

Ockham’s razor

: A scientific principle basically stating that if all else is equal, then the simplest theory is more likely to be right.

optics

: The study of light and how light travels through and between materials. (Geometric optics thinks of light as

rays

; physical optics tends to think of light as

waves

—both can be important!)

parabola

: A mathematical shape that describes the path of a thrown object; commonly seen in archways. Mathematically, one of the

conic sections

.

particle

: A discrete bit of matter; an idealization or simplification used to think about objects whose internal structure is irrelevant. (A

fundamental particle

, such as an electron, has mass but no relevant volume.)

particle physics

: The study of the fundamental constituents of nature and their interactions with one another.

periodic table

: Dmitri Mendeleev’s organization of atoms into a simple table, in increasing order of weight, which shows the underlying structure of atoms.

physics

: The science of the physical, measurable world. The study of matter and energy, space and time, and the structure and interactions of things in the world.

position

: The place an object is located at a given time.

potential energy

: Energy that is stored in an object to be released later (e.g., the chemical potential energy of gasoline); commonly refers to the gravitational potential energy an object has simply by virtue of being a height off the ground. Potential energy arises from interactions; for example, gravitational potential energy is a manifestation of the force of gravity and the work it can and will do if objects are allowed to fall toward one another.

pressure

: Force per unit area.

quantum mechanics

: The physical theory that tells how microscopic particles behave (as contrasted with classical or Newtonian mechanics, which is based entirely on force and Newton’s laws).

radio waves

: See


.

reductionism

: The philosophical principle that complex systems can be understood once we know what they are made of and how the constituents interact.

reference frame

: The perspective from which a person makes measurements. An

inertial reference frame

is one in which Newton’s first law holds.

relativity

: A deep principle of physics that says that the laws of physics are the same in every inertial frame. Galileo postulated this, but the generic term is now usually reserved for Einstein’s theories, which describe the motion of particles moving at high speeds. Special and general relativity modify our conventional views of space, time, and gravity (but do

not

say that “everything is relative”).

resistor

: An element in a circuit that reduces the current that can pass for a given voltage. The filament in a light bulb is a good example of a resistor.

rotational motion

: See

angular speed special relativity

: See

relativity.

Einstein’s 1905 theory describing the motion of particles moving at high speeds. (

Special

means that the theory is limited to observers moving with steady velocity and ignores gravity.)

speed

: A measure of the rate at which an object’s position is changing per second; how quickly an object is moving. (Distinguished from

velocity

, speed is just a number; it has no direction associated with it.)

stability

: A qualitative measure of how difficult it is to change the state or orientation of an object (e.g., a pencil standing on end is very unstable, while a pencil laying on its side is more stable).

static electricity

: The study of electric effects arising from charges that are not moving.



static equilibrium

: A state in which an object is subject to zero net force (and zero torque or “twisting”)

and

does not feel a large or increasing force if it is moved. Thus, a balanced pencil is in equilibrium, but the equilibrium is not

static

because the slightest perturbation will remove the pencil from equilibrium.

superpose

: Adding two forces or fields according to the rules of vector addition. Two opposing forces

superpose

to yield a total force of zero. Two parallel forces

superpose

to yield a doubly strong force.

system

: Any group of objects under consideration.

temperature

: A measure of the average thermal energy an object has. From a more practical perspective, temperature is what thermometers measure!

test particle

: A theoretical particle of infinitely small mass and charge used to map out force fields (without itself changing the field).

theorist

: A scientist who primarily devotes his or her time to studying the mathematics and concepts in current physics to extend the limits of those theories (as contrasted with an experimentalist).

theory

: A well-tested, organized way of understanding a broad variety of physical circumstances. It is not an idle “guess” or speculation (as the term is sometimes used in standard English); physicists do not use this word to mean “I have a theory about what’s going on here.” Examples include Newton’s theory of gravity or Einstein’s theory of special relativity. These are mathematical and physical formulations that organize and consolidate vast amounts of data. Theory combines facts, laws, and tested hypotheses.

thermal energy

: The total energy an object has stored internally, in the form of kinetic energy of vibrations of its atoms.

thermodynamics

: The study of temperature, heat, and thermal energy.

UV or ultraviolet radiation

: See


.

unification

: The goal of physicists to find a deep connection between forces. Electricity and magnetism were unified by Maxwell in the 1860s; they are both manifestations of one underlying

electromagnetic field

.

vector

: A mathematical arrow that contains information about the direction and size of a quantity. Examples of vectors include velocity (which is not just speed but also direction) or force (which is not just how hard a push is but also which direction it is in). Contrast this term with a

scalar

, which is just a number, for example, temperature or mass.

velocity

: The rate at which an object’s position is changing per second; how fast and in what direction an object is moving. (

Speed

is the magnitude of the velocity.)

volt

: The unit of electric potential in a circuit; a quantitative measure of the electrical potential energy per unit charge. Voltage differences tell, very crudely, the amount of “pressure” felt by electric charges in a circuit.

wave

: A self-propagating disturbance (usually of some medium, except for EM waves) that can carry energy but is not itself a particle.

wavelength

: In a wave, the distance between repeating parts of the wave.

work

: The physics term for the result of a force pushing (or pulling) on an object over some distance. Work is form of energy transfer. The definition is: work = force

×

distance traveled, where one counts the component of force only in the direction of motion.

X-rays

:

High-energy electromagnetic radiation. Often used as a synonym for

gamma rays

, although X-rays connote slightly lower-energy radiation. See


.



Part II

Professor Steven Pollock

T

HE

T

EACHING

C

OMPANY

®


©2006 The Teaching Company i

Steven Pollock Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder Steven Pollock is associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He did his undergraduate work at MIT, receiving a B.Sc. in physics in 1982. He holds a master’s and a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University, where he completed a thesis on “Electroweak Interactions in the Nuclear Domain” in 1987. He did postdoctoral research at NIKHEF (the National Institute for Nuclear and High Energy Physics) in Amsterdam from 1988

−

1990 and at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Seattle from 1990

−

1992. He spent a year as senior researcher at NIKHEF in 1993 before moving to Boulder. From 1993

−

2000, Professor Pollock’s research work focused on the intersections of nuclear and particle physics, with special focus on parity violation, neutrino physics, and virtual strangeness content of ordinary matter. Around the time he received tenure at CU Boulder, Professor Pollock began shifting his attention to the newly developing discipline-based research field of physics education research. This field now represents his full-time physics research activities. Professor Pollock was a teaching assistant and tutor for undergraduates throughout his years as both an undergraduate and graduate student. As a college professor, he has taught a wide variety of university courses at all levels, from introductory physics to advanced nuclear and particle physics, including quantum physics (both introductory and senior level) and mathematical physics, with intriguing recent forays into the physics of energy and the environment and the physics of sound and music. Professor Pollock is the author of

Thinkwell’s Physics I

, a CD-based introductory physics “next-generation” multimedia textbook. He became a Pew/Carnegie National Teaching Scholar in 2001 and is currently pursuing classroom research into replication and sustainability of reformed teaching techniques in (very) large lecture introductory courses. Professor Pollock received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1994, the Boulder Faculty Assembly (CU campus-wide) Teaching Excellence Award in 1998, and the Marinus G. Smith Recognition Award in 2006. He has presented both nuclear physics research and his scholarship on teaching at numerous conferences, seminars, and colloquia. He is a member of the American Physical Society, the Forum on Education, and the American Association of Physics Teachers.

Acknowledgments:

Many thanks to David Steussy and Charles (Max) Brown for their assistance in creating ancillary materials for this course!


©2006 The Teaching Company ii

Table of Contents Great Ideas of Classical Physics Part II

Professor Biography

............................................................................................i

Course Scope

.......................................................................................................1

Lecture Thirteen

Further Developments—Static Electricity.................3

Lecture Fourteen

Electricity, Magnetism, and Force Fields..................6

Lecture

Fifteen

Electrical Currents and Voltage.................................9

Lecture Sixteen

The Origin of Electric and Magnetic Fields............12

Lecture Seventeen

Unification I—Maxwell’s Equations.......................15

Lecture Eighteen

Unification II—Electromagnetism and Light..........18

Lecture Nineteen

Vibrations and Waves..............................................21

Lecture Twenty

Sound Waves and Light Waves...............................24

Lecture Twenty-One

The Atomic Hypothesis...........................................27

Lecture Twenty-Two

Energy in Systems—Heat and Thermodynamics....30

Lecture Twenty-Three

Heat and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.......33

Lecture Twenty-Four

The Grand Picture of Classical Physics...................36

Timeline

........................................................................................................Part I

Glossary

........................................................................................................Part I

Biographical Notes

............................................................................................39

Bibliography

......................................................................................................46




Scope:

Physics is the science that tries to understand the deep principles underlying the world we live in. It’s about understanding and describing nature. It’s about

things

, as opposed to biological or even chemical

systems

.

How

do things move?

Why

do they move? How do they

work

? Physicists search for deep patterns, for the fundamental simplicity and unity of measurable phenomena. In this course, we will follow a theme-based, quasi-historical path, highlighting the central concepts, ideas, and discoveries of classical physics.

Classical

here refers to scientific work done up to the start of the 20

th

century, that is, essentially all physics before the quantum theory and relativity. It is the physics of everyday life, the physics of a deterministic “clockwork” universe, with enormous explanatory and predictive power! We will spend a little time getting to know the characters who played key roles, including Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, and others, but the emphasis of the course is on sense-making: What have physicists learned about the world? What are the key underlying laws of nature? What are the primary organizing principles? How can we use these ideas and connect them to our personal experiences? Physics is a broad field of study and can be approached from many angles. We begin with a venerable branch of physics known as

mechanics

, the study of forces, energy, and motion. The word

mechanics

might make one think of car engines, and in some ways, that’s a good metaphor. Engines are complicated, but they are built out of simple and comprehensible parts, each of which serves a simple purpose. When put together, they create a familiar, useful, and understandable (by mechanics!) whole. But

mechanics

in physics is not about cars; it’s the study of how just about anything moves and what makes objects behave as they do when acted on by forces. It’s a study that will help us understand a vast and disparate array of phenomena, from Olympic high divers, to the display of sparks in a firework on the 4

th

of July, to the path of the Moon in the night sky, or the ceaseless bounce and jitter of atoms in a gas. We will focus on the central concepts: What do we know, and how do we know it? We’ll ask where the ideas came from and how we might test them. And, of course, we’ll ask what we can do with this knowledge. Classical mechanics is primarily the physics of Isaac Newton and a host of other brilliant characters who laid the groundwork for understanding the world that is still relevant 400 years after its beginnings. Our goal is to walk away with a sense of the order and coherence, the basic structure and principles of this foundation of physics. Mechanics sits underneath the rest of physics a bit like the foundation of a great cathedral. The second half of the course will add the edifice, structure, and turrets. We will need to understand the ideas behind

electricity

and

magnetism

, forces that dominate our technological world and lead to understanding of the structure of all matter and light. This investigation leads naturally to

optics

, which was unified with electricity and magnetism in a brilliant stroke in the mid-1800s. In this context, we will briefly consider

waves

and the myriad phenomena that become understandable, and intimately related to one another, once we grasp the basic ideas and consequences of vibrations. We will need to learn separately about

heat

and

thermodynamics

, a branch of classical physics that deals with everything from understanding car engines and power supplies to making a perfect cake. This course of study takes us right up to the start of the 20

th

century. One final comment: Mathematics plays a special role in science, one very dear to physicists, but we will not (and need not) focus on math in this course. Although skipping the equations limits, to some extent, the depth to which we can learn physics, the concepts themselves are, by and large, sensible, intuitive, and comprehensible through metaphor, life experience, ordinary logic, and common sense. From time to time, however, we may follow brief mathematical detours to appreciate the power and beauty of more formal or symbolic reasoning!

Notes on Course Materials:

Suggested

readings and computer simulations are listed with each lecture, using the abbreviations noted below.

Essential Computer Simulations (“Sims”):

These are all available at http://phet.colorado.edu and should run on PC or Mac. (Some of the Java applications require a fairly current Mac OS.)

Essential Reading:

Thinkwell

Professor Pollock’s

Thinkwell Physics I

, www.thinkwell.com. Hewitt Paul G. Hewitt,

Conceptual Physics

, Addison Wesley, 2005.



Hobson Art Hobson,

Physics: Concepts and Connections

, Prentice Hall, 2006. March Robert March,

Physics for Poets

, McGraw-Hill, 2002.


Feynman Feynman, Leighton, and Sands,


, Addison Wesley, 1963. Cropper William H. Cropper,

Great Physicists

, Oxford University Press, 2001. Gleick James Gleick,

Isaac Newton

, Vintage, 2003. Lightman Alan Lightman,

Great Ideas in Physics

, McGraw Hill, 2000. Crease Robert P. Crease,

The Prism and the Pendulum

, Random House, 2003. Gonick Larry Gonick and Art Huffman,


, Collins, 2005.



Lecture Thirteen Further Developments—Static Electricity

Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

—Henri Poincare

Scope:

For 200 years following the publication of the

Principia

, growing numbers of scientists followed the path laid out by Newton—a path paved from a philosophical, mathematical, theoretical, and experimental groundwork. The scope of “physics” expanded steadily and rapidly, and we can only touch on the many “great ideas” developed in this period: electricity, magnetism, waves, optics, and the grand unification of those ideas. Heat and temperature, chemistry, and the atomic worldview make up another path for us to follow. We will study some of these grand ideas in upcoming lectures—a few very briefly and some in more detail—to get a sense of the sweeping scale of accomplishments of classical physics. In this lecture, we begin our story of post-Newtonian classical physics with the “new” forces of static electricity and magnetism. We’ll look at static electricity as a classic example of a systematic investigation into a force of nature, but we’ll see that this “new” force still fits in tightly with the Newtonian framework.

Outline

I.

Let’s begin with a road map for the rest of the course.

A.

In covering some new topics, we will always begin with Newton’s ideas about forces, momentum, and energy and conservation laws.

B.

In the second half of the course, we will talk about the fundamental constituents of the world, particularly atoms and their motion. We’ll see that the motion of particles is connected to theories of electricity and magnetism, as well as theories of light and optics. We will also explore thermodynamics.

C.

We will discover a new hero in this part of this course, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who is to electricity and magnetism what Newton was to the fundamental, underlying laws of mechanics. As we’ll see, electricity and magnetism are evident everywhere in our world, especially in our technology but also in basic structures.

II.

In Newton’s day, electricity was a curiosity. People were aware of the phenomenon of static electricity but didn’t begin to investigate it scientifically until about 100 years after Newton.

A.

We’re all familiar with static electricity. Think of walking across a carpet, touching the doorknob, and getting a shock or pulling apart clothes that have just come out of the dryer. Whenever anything sticks together, like the clothes, that implies a force of nature, and in this case, the force is not just friction.

B.

Let’s investigate static electricity using a simplified approach.

1.

Benjamin Franklin (1706

−

1790) helped start us on the path toward our current model of electric charges. In addition to flying the kite in the electrical storm, Franklin conducted experiments in which he rubbed various objects together, such as cat fur on amber or glass rods.

2.

Try a similar experiment on your own: Take about a foot of tape and fold over the ends to make tabs for pulling the tape up. Label this piece of tape

b

for “bottom.” Place a second piece of tape on top of the first and label it

t

for “top”; then, stick both pieces of tape, now stuck together, down on a flat, clean table. Next, duplicate the experimental setup. Play around with the tape by ripping it off the table, then ripping the two pieces apart.

3.

It will be immediately obvious that the pieces of tape are charged. You’ll also discover that different things happen to the top tape and the bottom tape. Two top tapes, for example, will repel each other, but a top and bottom will attract.

C.

Let’s construct a simple model to help us describe and understand the basic phenomenology of static electricity.

1.

Recall our discussion of what a model is: a simplified, descriptive picture. It must be consistent with known experiments and lead us to predictions about future experiments.



2.

In the accepted model of electricity and magnetism, the world is made of atoms that carry electric charge. Electric charge is the quantity that exhibits the force of static electricity.

3.

The tape experiment shows us that we need two types of charge to explain the results. Ben Franklin named these types of charges

positive

and

negative

.

4.

How did Franklin know that there wasn’t a third type of charge? Ockham’s razor (named for a medieval philosopher, William of Ockham) suggests that we use the simplest explanation to understand complex phenomena. In other words, we don’t add another charge because we aren’t required to by the data.

D.

Franklin’s choice of

positive

and

negative

for the names of the two charges is helpful to our understanding of electricity, because it leads us to think of adding

plus

and

minus

charges. When we add positive and negative charges, the net charge is zero.

E.

According to our model, the world is filled with positive and negative charges, and as we deduce from the tape experiment, opposite charges attract and like charges repel.

F.

Newton saw that the gravitational force between two masses arises because of the mass. In the same way, the electrical force arises because of the charge. As we’ll see in an upcoming lecture, we find the strength of the electrical force by multiplying the charges. Again, with multiplying, the positive and negative sign convention neatly summarizes the fact that opposite charges attract and like charges repel.

G.

Our model is predictive and explanatory, but it doesn’t tell us what charge is; it only postulates that charge exists.

1.

With our model, you can see that combing your hair separates charges; the comb becomes negatively charged and your hair becomes positively charged. Your hair stands on end because all those like charges are repelling one another.

2.

You can also understand why a balloon will stick to you after you rub it on your shirt, but why does it stick to the wall? The answer is that the wall also has electrical charges in it. Any negative charges in the wall that are free to move will be repelled by the balloon; any positive charges in the wall that are free to move will be attracted to the balloon. Separation of charges takes place again.

H.

In one respect, Franklin’s naming convention may be slightly confusing: We now use the term

electrons

for particles that carry negative charges, and these are the particles that move most easily in nature, although we might tend to associate positive charge with movement. Nonetheless, the simple story of static electricity has been spectacularly useful

III.

Let’s turn briefly to magnetism.

A.

Find a child’s set of magnets and experiment with them on your own. You’ll find that magnetic force is quite similar to electric force. Instead of positive and negative charges, we say that magnets have

north

and

south poles

, which attract and repel each other analogously to charges.

B.

One difference between magnets and static electricity is that magnetism seems to be permanent, whereas static electricity tends to fade with time for ordinary objects.

IV.

We now have only a very basic understanding of static electricity. In future lectures, we’ll see that the lightning bolt that Franklin was investigating; forces of nature, such as friction; and the high technology we now use all arise simply from the postulation of positive and negative charges and the electrical forces (ultimately, using Newton’s law) between them.


Go to http://phet.colorado.edu and play with Balloons and Static Electricity and John Travoltage. Do the balloons behave realistically? Are they conductors or insulators? How about the walls? Is charge flowing in the walls? Can you understand why the balloons stick to the wall, even though the total charge of the wall is zero? Why doesn’t John Travoltage generate a spark immediately? Why does he have to build up some charge first? What role does the doorknob play? Why do you need it?

Essential Reading:

Hewitt, start of ch 21, Hobson, ch 8.4, March, start of ch 6.




Gonick, chapter 12.


Suppose somebody proposed to you that we are attracted to the Earth, not because of gravity, but because of static electrical forces. How could you convince this person that he or she is incorrect?

2.

Try the tape experiment described in the lecture. What variations can you come up with? Can you determine which piece is positive and which is negative? Can you explain all your observations by hypothesizing only two charges (positive and negative), or do you need more?

3.

Buy some toy magnets—not kitchen magnets but small bar magnets with two clear poles, like the plastic-coated, super-strong magnets that come with ball bearings as in a child’s building kit. How are these magnets the same as and how are they different from the charged tapes? Can you prove that they are not attracting and repelling because of forces of static electricity? Can you build a compass out of these magnets?

4.

Suppose that Ben Franklin had reversed his choice of which material to call

plus

and which to call

minus

. Would this change any of our laws of physics? What would be different?



Lecture Fourteen Electricity Magnetism and Force Fields

Since Maxwell’s time, physical reality has been thought of as represented by continuous fields, and not capable of any mechanical interpretation. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.

—Albert Einstein

Scope:

In the last lecture, we introduced a “new” force in nature, electricity, and we constructed a model in which there were two kinds of electric charge, positive and negative.

Electric charge

is a term we used to describe the source of the static electrical force. Using our model, we saw that like charges repel each other and opposite charges attract. In this lecture, we’ll move away from thinking of electric charge as “action at a distance,” as Newton did, and begin thinking about electrical

fields

. This concept will help us to understand electricity better and to reformulate the way we think about gravity. The key player in the origination of the mathematical theory of static electricity was Charles Coulomb, a French scientist and engineer working in the 1780s. Coulomb’s experiments with static electricity were similar to those conducted by Henry Cavendish to measure the force of gravity. We’ll also look at the work of Michael Faraday, the British physicist who introduced the concept of a force field, and we’ll see how this idea allows us to dispense with action at a distance and visualize force as a local phenomenon.

Outline

I.

Charles Coulomb (1736

−

1806) discovered the fundamental mathematical relationship describing static electrical forces in the 1780s.

A.

To understand the gist of Coulomb’s experiments, imagine charging up a balloon by rubbing it on your shirt. You’ll discover that the charges on the balloon tend to stay put. The side of the balloon that you rubbed will be highly charged; the other side of the balloon will not be any more charged than it was to begin with. In physics, the balloon would be called an

insulator

, that is, an object in which charges can’t migrate easily. Metals have the opposite property; in metals (

conductors

), charges spread out easily.

B.

Coulomb experimented with metal spheres, which allowed him to distribute charges and measure the forces between them.

C.

In honor of Coulomb’s work, electric charge is measured in units called coulombs. One coulomb (1 C) is a significant amount of electric charge; a balloon rubbed on your shirt might have only 1/1,000,000 C

II.

Let’s look back again at the force of gravity.

A.

Masses cause a gravitational attraction, and the force of gravity is a constant of nature (measured by Cavendish) multiplied by the mass of one object times the mass of a second object, divided by the square of the distance between the two objects.

B.

Coulomb discovered that electricity could be described in much the same way, using the idea of charge rather than mass. Multiplying the charge on one object (measured in coulombs) by the charge on a second object will tell us how strong the force is between those two objects. Coulomb also discovered that static electrical attraction or repulsion, like the force of gravity, declines with greater distance between the two charged objects.

C.

There are some similarities between the force of electricity and the force of gravity, but the two forces are

not

the same thing. For instance, in considering the force of gravity, we know that all masses attract, but with electricity, both attraction and repulsion take place.

III.

Like Newton’s law, Coulomb’s law was still a description of mysterious “action at a distance,” which Newton himself was not comfortable with. The resolution to the problem of two unconnected objects somehow influencing each other was the idea of a

force field

, introduced by a British physicist, Michael Faraday (1791

−

1867).

A.

Faraday was originally a bookbinder. His lack of formal mathematical training compelled him to think of visual ways to describe and understand complex phenomena, such as electricity and magnetism.










































Bibliography

Essential Reading:

Hewitt, Paul.

Conceptual Physics.

Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 2005. This is a textbook for a course perhaps a little more technically oriented than ours, but it’s really wonderful. Hewitt is very accessible, with a strong focus on sense-making and understanding. Highly recommended to go along with this course if you want to push a little farther. Be aware: Trying to “read” a textbook like this one is a difficult task. You can’t read it like a work of literature (much less like the daily paper or a novel)—it requires time for calculations, projects, and reflection. Hobson, Art.

Physics: Concepts and Connections.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.This is a textbook for a traditional course very much like ours. Aimed at the nonscientist (no algebra, minimal use of graphs and numbers), it’s a good survey of the field. Hobson follows four themes: how we know science, post-Newtonian physics (which is not an emphasis of this course!), energy, and the social context of physics. Hobson also follows a quasi-historical path, with quite a bit of discussion about the nature of science and the context and significance of the big ideas in physics. March, Robert H.

Physics for Poets

. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996. This book is very much on the level and style of our course. This one is not a conventional physics text at all; it has a few equations but doesn’t fuss with their manipulation. It is much more a historical overview of the big ideas and central characters of physics. A good companion to this course, although a bit brief if you become interested in any given individual and, indeed, a little superficial (focusing on the “ideal physicists” rather than troubling itself with historical complexities) if you have a historical bent, but a good start for getting into this material. Pollock, Steven, and Ephraim Fischbach,

Thinkwell Physics I

(www.thinkwell.com). This is a multimedia video textbook, a collection of 10-minute “mini-lectures” by yours truly, covering much of classical mechanics, plus waves and oscillations. These lectures are designed to go along with a much more traditional physics course, but if you concentrate on the introductory lectures in each topic (rather than on the ones focused on calculating and problem-solving), they should complement the material in this course nicely. And if you decide you do want to delve a little farther into the mathematics on your own,

Thinkwell

will certainly be a useful guide.

Recommended Reading

(referenced explicitly in this course): Crease, Robert.

The Prism and the Pendulum.

New York: Random House, 2003. A lovely book, aimed very much at the audience for this course. His theme is that science and scientific experiments can be beautiful—not in some abstract way, not stretching the definition of the word, but meaning precisely what we always mean by

beauty

. Science and scientific experiments convey harmony, symmetry, and depth; they lead us to realizations about ourselves and the world; they change our outlook in positive ways; and they make us happy. Crease has picked 10 great experiments and explains them clearly and compellingly. Although the last few reach the realm of modern physics, this book is a nice complement to this course. Cropper, William.

Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking

. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Short chapters on about 30 of the most influential physicists from Galileo to Hawking, with details on both the people and the physics they discovered. There are some equations, though the math is not a heavy emphasis, and they are often treated separately from the conceptual and historical discussions. Brief by its nature but well written and a nice mix of culture, significance, and physics itself. I learned a lot from this book! Feynman, Richard P., Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands.


. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 2005. I have to include this textbook, although “reading” it is essentially an impossible task for someone not already familiar with the basics of physics. Feynman sat down with the goal of presenting the great fundamental ideas of physics at an introductory college level; the result is this compilation of notes/text for his extraordinary freshman physics course at CalTech in the 1960s. He reformulated the traditional “canon” based on his own ingenious insights, creativity, and novel point of view. Once you’ve got some solid understanding of the basics of physics (even somewhat beyond where this course will take you), going back to this text will be a pleasure and a reward. Gleick, James.

Isaac Newton.

New York: Vintage Books, 2004. An engaging biography of Newton that discusses the physics only qualitatively but sets a clear background of the context and culture in which Newton worked and the significance of his work. Detailed and full of insight into Newton’s personality, this book paints a more complete picture than most biographies.



Gonick, Larry, and Art Huffman.


.

London: Collins, 2005. I know that these

Cartoon Guides

may look superficial, but I’m a fan of this series. The coverage is solid, and the books are clever and fun to read. This book matches well with our course, and there’s a nice mix of representations—I believe the cartoons do help make sense of the basic ideas of classical physics. Lightman, Alan.

Great Ideas in Physics.

New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. Lightman zooms in on only four “great ideas” (two from classical physics, energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics). His perspective melds physics, philosophy, and art, although he focuses on the physics, walking you through a little bit of the mathematics to get a taste for the role of math in understanding. A little limited in scope, but useful if you would like to begin the trip from conceptual physics to mathematical physics without taxing your math skills (you need to be comfortable with ratios and basic algebra). The questions for reflection at the end of the book are particularly good.

Further Recommended Reading:

Asimov, Isaac.

The History of Physics

. New York: Walker & Co., 1984. Asimov has produced a readable, comprehensive history of physics, although it’s not so much history as it is details and concepts mixed in with history, biography, and philosophy of science. Christianson, Gale.

Isaac Newton

(Lives and Legacies Series). New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. A brief, simple introduction to Newton and his physics. Although it’s a little less nuanced than Gleick’s biography (listed above), I nevertheless enjoyed this selection. Cohen, I. Bernard.

The Birth of a New Physics

, rev. ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. Good historical coverage of the physics of the early scientific revolution, particularly in the 16

th

and 17

th

centuries. de Campos Valadares, E.

Physics, Fun, and Beyond: Electrifying Projects and Inventions from Recycled and Low-Cost Materials

. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006. This is a collection of simple, “at-home” experiments and projects, spanning much of classical experimental physics, suitable for science fair ideas, family projects and gifts, teaching/outreach, or just plain interesting hobby activities. Great for those who prefer to learn by doing, although the author also takes care to explain the physics behind each of the projects. Ehrlich, Robert.

Turning the World Inside Out and 174 Other Simple Physics Demonstrations

.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Another collection of physics activities and demonstrations, this one is aimed a little more at a teacher, but it provides inspiring ideas for anyone interested in watching physics in action in clear, simplified ways. Each project has detailed construction instructions and physics explanations, and almost all the projects are quite simple, requiring relatively little in the way of expense or equipment. Epstein, Lewis.

Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality

. San Francisco: Insight Press, 2002. A wonderful collection of cartoon-based “thinker” puzzles, designed to see if you have a strong conceptual understanding of many of the topics of classical physics, such as how tides work or why steel ships float. These questions are often designed at the level of an introductory college course (some of them involve sense-making of the mathematics in a traditional physics class), but by and large, there is no calculation of any kind required for these questions, just clear thinking about the underlying principles of physics. Epstein is great at talking through the wrong answers to help you “think about your own thinking.” Ferguson, Kitty.

Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens

. New York: Walker & Co., 2002. A good biography of these two remarkable historical figures that includes some of the essential physical ideas, highlighting the brilliance of Kepler’s achievements. Feynman, Richard.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

. New York: Basic Books, 2005. ———.

Six Easy Pieces: Essential Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

. New York: Basic Books, 2005. ———.

The Character of Physics Law

. New York: Modern Library, 1994. ———.

The Meaning of It All

. New York: Basic Books, 1998. Richard Feynman is one of the great 20

th

-century physicists, and his perspectives on the nature of science are unparalleled.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

is a collection of Feynman’s essays on a number of topics, offering nontechnical but delightful insights into how science is done.

Six Easy Pieces

is a collection of the least technical chapters from the

Feynman Lectures

, in which he introduces big topics of (mostly, with one or two exceptions) classical physics ideas.

The Character of Physical Law

is in a similar style, focusing on some central topics of physics and talking both about the details and the “meta” issues, the nature and consequences of science.

The Meaning of It All

drifts farther from the physics and into issues of the connections among science, religion, and



politics. There are many other books by (and about) Feynman, all of which are highly recommended, although some go beyond the “classical” focus of our course. Gamow, George.

The Great Physicists, from Galileo to Einstein

.

New York: Dover Publications, 1988. George Gamow, inventor of the Big Bang theory, is a skilled author for non-physicists. Gamow’s books are gems, inspiring, and suitable even for young adults. This “biography” of physics covers much of the classical physics topics we’ve focused on, ending with some discussion of modern ideas. Gribbin, John.

The Scientists: A History of Science Told through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors.

New York: Random House, 2004. Five hundred years of science in 672 pages—this is a comprehensive book, written compellingly, with anecdotes and stories. Gribbin organizes and connects the characters and developments. A reference (you can wander from spot to spot in the book if you want) that also makes for a compelling read, albeit a little heavy going. Heilbron, John L.

The Oxford Guide to the History of Physics and Astronomy

. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. An encyclopedic collection (quite literally) of information about the personalities and the physics; very complete, informative, and surprisingly interesting just to read. Holton, Gerald, and Stephen Brush.

Physics, the Human Adventure: From Copernicus to Einstein and Beyond

.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Teaching physics with an accurate historical and philosophical perspective, with more history than March’s

Physics for Poets

. Jargodzki, C., and F. Potter.

Mad About Physics: Braintwisters, Paradoxes, and Curiosities

. New York: Wiley, 2001. Another collection of physics puzzles; maybe just a little less “physics-serious” than Walker’s

Flying Circus

(see below), it provides briefer explanations to a broader assortment of puzzles. This entertaining book takes advantage of paradoxes as a teaching tool and includes wonderful quotes. Jungnickel, Christa, and Russell McCormmach.

Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein

, 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. This book focuses on the emergence of theoretical physics as a discipline, mostly in Germany and Austria, between 1850 and 1925, offering a largely biographical development and context. A scholarly work; again, a little heavy going but particularly appropriate for the electricity and magnetism section of this course. Kakalos, James.

The Physics of Superheroes.

New York: Gotham, 2005. I may have a soft spot for whimsical physical texts, but this one strikes me as very successful at teaching the basic principles of classical physics in the context of comic-book superheroes. The comics provide a framing for Kakalos to teach the basic principles of physics in an engaging way. Kuhn, Thomas.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Kuhn is a philosopher of science who popularized the notion of paradigm shifts. This book discusses the nature of the evolution and progress of scientific ideas. Kuhn argues that, for the most part, scientific progress is incremental and exists within a scientific (and sociological) framework; only rarely are “revolutions” possible. Some traditional physicists disagree with Kuhn’s arguments regarding the extent to which scientific progress is socially constructed, but the work is interesting, challenging, and influential. MacAulay, David.

The New Way Things Work

.

Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. A cartoon-based book, whimsical and amusing, it takes an engineering and physics approach to examine devices and ask how they work, incorporating physics concepts in a meaningful way. Aimed at children, but child-like adults (like me) can appreciate this book. Mahon, Basil.

The Man Who Changed Everything:

The Life of James Clerk Maxwell.

New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. A brief and readable biography of Maxwell’s life and science. It doesn’t get so much into the physics but offers good insights into Maxwell as a human being and scientist! Nye, Mary Jo.

Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800–1940

.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. A thorough study of the two sciences together, emphasizing the social and historical context. Purrington, R. D.

Physics in the Nineteenth Century

. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. A little heavy going, this is pure historical analysis but covers all the major players in the physics of the 1800s, with an emphasis on the development of ideas leading to the coming revolutions of the 20

th

century. Shamos, Morris, ed.

Great Experiments in Physics: Firsthand Accounts from Galileo to Einstein

. New York: Dover Publications, 1987. A collection of 25 key experiments (including many discussed in this course), introduced and



explained, then followed with annotated original works. A unique book; it’s great (and surprisingly rare) to read the originals. Spielberg, N., and B. Anderson.

Seven Ideas That Shook the Universe

. New York: Wiley, 1995. A comprehensive text, covering the ideas of this course and following a conceptual framework. Aimed at the non-physicist. A highly readable text. Vollmann, William.

Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.

New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. A book (written by a nonscientist) that explores how Copernicus could have come up with the heliocentric hypothesis and convinced himself of its correctness. Not always the easiest read but a fascinating story that gets at the core of the start of the scientific revolution and the nature of scientific reasoning. Von Baeyer, Hans Christian.

Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat

.

New York: Modern Library, 1999. A well-written historical and physical treatment of thermodynamics. A good introduction to the story of thermodynamics, which alas, we barely have time to even introduce in this course. Walker, Jearl.

The Flying Circus of Physics with Answers

.

New York: Wiley, 1977. A collection of “puzzles,” all curious, real-world phenomena for you to think about, that demand physical explanation: Why does chalk squeak? How does a one-way mirror work? What’s the “green flash” at sunset? Why wasn’t Ben Franklin killed when he flew his kite in a lightning storm? These questions are a lot of fun to explore! The puzzles are organized around broad themes of classical physics (such as mechanics, optics, acoustics, thermodynamics, and so on).

Standard Introductory Physics Textbooks

(a selection):

A number of textbooks are used in introductory college-level physics courses. These are not generally designed as “standalone” reading but are meant to be used with the guidance and support of an instructor. If you decide to buy one to try out on your own, be advised that these are not “evening reading material.” There are so many, I list below only a few of my personal favorites (the one I authored,

Thinkwell Physics

, was listed with the essential texts, above). Many others are in use in college courses around the world; this is a very abbreviated list! Bloomfield, Louis.

How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life.

New York: Wiley, 2005. An unconventional introduction to physics, aimed at nonscientists who want to learn the basic principles of physics and the applications to everyday life. Rather than organizing the text around physics concepts, the author focuses each chapter on a technological or physical application (generally both common and interesting!). This approach develops the physical principles in a deeply motivating way. Of all the texts listed in this section, Bloomfield’s is likely to be the most accessible to the interested layperson, but even so, it remains a textbook that would probably best be used in the framework of a course with an instructor. Chabay, Ruth, and Bruce Sherwood.

Matter and Interactions

. New York: Wiley, 2003. Most of the standard introductory texts follow pretty much the same pattern, teaching the same classical physics topics in roughly the same order (perhaps adding modern physics in the end) and focusing on the same mathematical skills. This text offers a fresh approach. Sherwood and Chabay are part of the physics education research community and treat introductory physics from a completely modern perspective. Relativity and the atomic model are involved right from the start, and the separation between classical and modern physics is purposefully blurred. The authors emphasize modeling systems throughout. If you want to learn physics with the intent of becoming a physicist, this would be an excellent first textbook to use, but again, the level of mathematics and sophistication required is fairly high; this is certainly not “light reading.” Giancoli, Douglas.

Principles with Applications

. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004. This is a fairly traditional and popular introductory textbook, designed specifically for an algebra-based course. Many of the applications and examples in the book are tailored to students who are less likely to be physicists or engineers but might be interested in medicine, biology, or architecture. Halliday, David, Robert Resnick, and Jearl Walker,

Fundamentals of Physics

(New York: Wiley, 2004), or perhaps, Karen Cummings, Priscilla Laws, Edward Redish, and Patrick Cooney,

Understanding Physics

(New York: Wiley, 2004). Halliday, et al., has been one of the standard texts at many schools for many years. As you move up to more recent editions, there is a stronger focus on conceptual understanding. The

Understanding Physics

book is basically a new, updated version, redesigned to incorporate physics education research results, but it is nevertheless still a dense, heavy, mathematically centered introductory text. It remains one of my favorites for teaching calculus-based physics and engineering courses. Knight, Randall.

Physics for Scientists and Engineers: A Strategic Approach

. Reading, MA: Pearson/Addison-Wesley, 2003. Similar in content to Halliday, Resnick, and Walker, above. Knight has also taken a stab at rewriting



the conventional introductory calculus-based textbook with physics education research results in mind. That means using research on common student learning difficulties, incorporating alternative representations and metaphors, and including problems and questions designed through iterative research studies. Moore, Thomas.

Six Ideas That Shaped Physics

.

New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. This is another modern, nonstandard approach to the introductory text. Breaking the subject into six fundamental “big ideas” (such as conservation laws, reference frame–independence of physics, universal laws, and so on), Moore leads the student to apply basic principles to solve realistic physical problems, rather than following a more traditional, plug-’n-chug, formula-centric approach.

Internet Resources:

The Web has an overwhelming supply of resources regarding introductory physics (

some

of which are even accurate and useful)! The task of selecting just a few sites is difficult (and the situation will likely evolve so quickly as to limit the usefulness of this list), but below are a few Web sites that I believe are definitely worth investigating. http://phet.colorado.edu. This is the simulation site referred to throughout this course, developed by the Physics Education Research group at the University of Colorado. http://natsim.net/en.html. This site contains links to other physics simulation collections. Although the phet sims (listed above) are very helpful, they cover only a narrow range of topics. This page will take you to sites with hundreds of applets. In addition, you might want to visit sites mentioned explicitly in the lecture notes:

•

www.cecm.sfu.ca/~scharein/astro

•

www.walter-fendt.de/ph11e

•

http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/semester1 http://howthingswork.virginia.edu/. Louis Bloomfield (whose introductory textbook for nonscientists,

How Things Work

, is also on my recommended list) has created a high-quality frequently-asked-questions page for explanations about the physics of everyday life. If you have a question about a device or phenomenon, there’s a pretty good chance you will be able to find an answer on this page. http://www.merlot.org/merlot/materials.htm?category=2737. The Merlot Web site (www.merlot.org) is a national resource for academics in a variety of fields to compile learning materials. The link above takes you specifically to a collection of peer-reviewed resources for classical mechanics. (Moving up a level will allow you to explore more of physics, including electricity and magnetism and modern physics) www.aip.org/history/syllabi/books.htm. The AIP is the American Institute of Physics. This is the institute’s “bibliography” page, with many highly recommended books. (Some of them I have listed above, but I’ve tried to keep my bibliography distinct. AIP’s selection is very good!) www.aip.org/history/gap/. Another AIP page, this one has links to the works of some great American physicists (including original papers, with explanations), including Franklin, Gibbs, and many others. www.physlink.com/Education/History.cfm. A collection of links to other sites, with history and timelines. Also many links to science museums. www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/index.html. This page calls itself the History of Mathematics Archives, but it’s very thorough, and its compilers apparently consider most physicists to be mathematicians. The biographies are interesting and comprehensive without being overwhelming. This is my favorite site for a “quick read” about some historical figure I’m interested in. www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PVB/PVB.html. This is the University of Toronto’s

Physics Virtual Bookshelf

. The staff at the university has put together an impressive collection of links and articles. A nice place to start digging deeper into the history and content of physics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics. Wikipedia is a collective, informal, Web-based encyclopedia. This site is frequently helpful, and I use it all the time (not just for physics!). But beware: It is the nature of Wikipedia that there can, on occasion, be mistakes or even sheer nonsense here. These articles are submitted by individuals without “authorization”; this is not the usual method of scientific peer review by any stretch of the imagination. If you learn something here, follow up to make sure that it’s accurate and reliable. Nevertheless, Wikipedia is often my first stop when I’m looking up something new. www.physics.org/. From the Institute of Physics, many links and interactive sites for history and the “physics of everyday life.”



http://physicsweb.org/bestof/history. Another compilation of historical information and links, this one put together by the Institute of Physics (IoP). www.hssonline.org/teach_res/essays/mf_essays.html. A recommended bibliography from the History of Science Society. Once again, many good books here, organized in a variety of categories (social, historical, bibliographic). An excellent resource for delving further into the history of classical physics! http://galileo.rice.edu/. A comprehensive Web site about Galileo. www.tychobrahe.com/eng_tychobrahe/index.html. A comprehensive Web site about Brahe. www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/. A comprehensive Web site about Maxwell.

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