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GALILEO AND EINSTEIN

Overview and Lecture Index
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1

Counting in Babylon

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Babylon had in all probability the earliest written language. At the same time, an elegant
system of weights and measures kept the peace in the marketplace. Their method of
counting was in some ways better than our present one! We look at some ancient math
tables, and ideas about Pythagoras' theorem 1,000 years before Pythagoras.
2

Early Greek Science: Thales to Plato

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In the ancient port city of Miletus, there took place a "discovery of nature": philosophers
tried to understand natural phenomena without invoking the supernatural. The Greeks
imported basic geometric ideas from Egypt, and developed them further. Members of the
Pythagorean cult announced the famous theorem, and the (to them) alarming discovery of
irrational numbers! The Greeks had some ideas about elements and atoms. Hippocrates
looked for non-supernatural causes of disease. Plato formulated a rationale for higher
education, and thought about atoms.
3

Motion in the Heavens: Stars, Sun, Moon, Planets

A brief review for moderns of facts familiar to almost everybody in the ancient world:
how the sun, moon and planets move through the sky over the course of time.
4

Aristotle

A brief look at the beginnings of science and philosophy in Athens: Plato's Academy and
Aristotle's Lyceum. On to Aristotle's science: "causes" in living things and inanimate
matter, Aristotle's elements, and laws of motion.
5

Measuring the Solar System

We look at some startlingly good measurements by the Greeks of the size of the earth and
the distance to the moon, and a less successful (but correct in principle) attempt to find
the distance to the sun.
6

Greek Science after Aristotle

Strato understood that falling bodies pick up speed (contrary to Aristotle's assertions).
Aristarchus gave a completely correct view of the solar system, anticipating Copernicus
by 2,000 years or so. Science flourished for centuries in Alexandria, Egypt: Euclid,
Apollonius, Hypatia and others lived there, Archimedes studied there. Archimedes
understood leverage and buoyancy, developed military applications, approximated Pi
very closely, and almost invented calculus! (See also the next lecture.)
7

Basic Ideas in Greek Mathematics

Nailing down the square root of 2. Zeno's paradoxes: Achilles and the tortoise. Proving
an arrow can never move - analyzing motion, the beginning of calculus. How Archimedes
calculated Pi to impressive accuracy, squared the circle, and did an integral to find the
area of a sphere.
8

How the Greeks used Geometry to Understand the Stars

The universe is like an onion of crystal spheres: Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle. More earthly
ideas: Eudoxus and Aristarchus. Understanding planetary motion in terms of cycles and
epicycles: Hipparchus and Ptolemy. These methods were refined to the point where they
gave accurate predictions of planetary positions for centuries (even though Ptolemy
believed the earth was at rest at the center of the universe).
How Greek Science Reached Baghdad

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Some Later Islamic Science PDF

9

Galileo and the Telescope

Copernicus challenged Ptolemy's worldview. Evolution of the telescope. Galileo saw

mountains on the moon, and estimated their height - the first indication that the moon was
earthlike, not a perfect ethereal sphere at all.
10 Life of Galileo

A few facts and anecdotes to try to give something of the flavor of Galileo's life and
times, plus references to books for those who would like a more complete picture.
11 Scaling: why giants don't exist

One of Galileo's most important contributions to science (and engineering): the

realization that since areas and volumes scale differently when the size of an object is
increased keeping all proportions the same, physical properties of large objects may be

dramatically different from similar small objects, not just scaled up versions of the same
thing. We explore some of the consequences.
12 Galileo's Acceleration Experiment

Galileo argued against Aristotle's assertions that falling bodies fall at steady speeds, with
heavier objects falling proportionately faster. Galileo argued that falling bodies pick up
speed at a steady rate (until they move so fast that air resistance becomes important). He
constructed an experiment to prove his point (and we reproduced it).
13 Naturally Accelerated Motion

This lecture presents the core of Galileo's analysis of motion in free fall, which he
referred to as "naturally accelerated motion". This is challenging material if you're new to
it, but crucial in progressing from an Aristotelian or medieval worldview to that of
Galileo and Newton, the basis of our modern understanding of nature. Galileo used his
new-found understanding of falling motion to prove that a projectile follows a parabolic
path, if air resistance can be ignored.
14 Describing Motion

A simple introduction to the modern way of describing motion using arrows - "vectors" to indicate speed and direction. Galileo (and, later, Newton) made heavy use of Greek
geometry in analyzing motion. It's much easier, and just as valid, to use vectors.
15 Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler

These two colorful characters made crucial contributions to our understanding of the
universe: Tycho's observations were accurate enough for Kepler to discover that the
planets moved in elliptic orbits, and find some simple rules about how fast they moved.
These became known as Kepler's Laws, and gave Newton the clues he needed to
establish universal inverse-square gravitation.
This lecture links to more detailed lectures I gave previously.
16 Isaac Newton

A brief account of Newton's life, followed by a discussion of perhaps his most important
insight: that a cannonball shot horizontally, and fast enough, from an imagined
mountaintop above the atmosphere might orbit the earth. This tied together Galileo's
understanding of projectiles with the motion of the moon, and was the first direct
understanding (as opposed to description) of motion in the heavens.

17 How Newton Built on Galileo's Ideas

Newton's famous Laws of Motion generalized and extended Galileo's discussion of

falling objects and projectiles. Putting these laws together with his Law of Universal
Gravitation, Newton was able to account for the observed motions of all the planets. This
lecture gives a careful development of the basic concepts underlying Newton's Laws, in
particular the tricky concept of acceleration in a moving body that is changing direction essential to really understanding planetary motion.
18 The Speed of Light

Aristotle thought it was infinite, Galileo tried unsuccessfully to measure it with lanterns
on hilltops, a Danish astronomer found it first by observing Jupiter's moons. Rival
Frenchmen found it quite accurately about 1850, but a far more precise experiment was
carried out in 1879 in Annapolis, Maryland by Albert Abraham Michelson.
19 The Michelson-Morley Experiment

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By the late 1800's, it had been established that light was wavelike, and in fact consisted
of waving electric and magnetic fields. These fields were thought somehow to be
oscillations in a material aether, a transparent, light yet hard substance that filled the
universe (since we see light from far away). Michelson devised an experiment to detect
the earth's motion through this aether, and the result contributed to the development of
special relativity.
20 Special Relativity

Galileo had long ago observed that in a closed windowless room below decks in a
smoothly moving ship, it was impossible to do an experiment to tell if the ship really was
moving. Physicists call this "Galilean relativity" - the laws of motion are the same in a
smoothly moving room (that is to say, one that isn't accelerating)as in a room "at rest".
Einstein generalized the notion to include the more recently discovered laws concerning
electric and magnetic fields, and hence light. He deduced some surprising consequences,
recounted below.
21 Special Relativity: What Time is it?

The first amazing consequence of Einstein's seemingly innocuous generalization of

Galileo's observation is that time must pass differently for observers moving relative to
one another - moving clocks run slow. We show how this comes about, and review the
experimental evidence that it really happens. We also show that if times pass differently
for different observers, lengths must look different too.

22 Special relativity: Synchronizing Clocks

Another essential ingredient in the relativistic brew is that if I synchronize two clocks at
opposite ends of a train I'm on, say, they will not appear to be synchronized to someone
on the ground watching the train go by. (Of course, the discrepancy is tiny at ordinary
speeds, but becomes important for speeds comparable to that of light).
23 Time Dilation: A Worked Example

At first sight, it seems impossible that each of two observers can claim the other one's
clock runs slow. Surely one of them must be wrong? We give a detailed analysis to
demonstrate that this is a perfectly logically consistent situation, when one remembers
also to include effects of length contraction and of lack of synchronization - special
relativity makes perfect sense!
24 More Relativity: the Train and the Twins

Some famous paradoxes raised in attempts to show that special relativity was selfcontradictory. We show how they were resolved.
25 Momentum, Work and Energy

An elementary review of these basic concepts in physics, placed here for the convenience
of nonscience majors who may be a little rusty on these things, and will need them to
appreciate something of what relativity has to say about dynamics - the science of
motion.
26 Adding Velocities: A Walk on the Train

A straight forward application of the new relativistic concepts of time dilation, length
contraction etc., reveals that if you walk at exactly 3 m.p.h. towards the front of a train
that's going exactly 60 m.p.h., your speed relative to the ground is not 63 m.p.h. but a
very tiny bit less! Again, this difference from common sense is only detectable if one of
the speeds is comparable with that of light, but then it becomes very important.
27 Conserving Momentum: the Relativistic Mass Increase

How the very general physical principle of momentum conservation in collisions, when
put together with special relativity, predicts that an object's mass increases with its speed,
and how this startling prediction has been verified experimentally many times over. The
increase in mass is related to the increase in kinetic energy by E = mc2. This formula turns
out to be more general: any kind of energy, not just kinetic energy, is associated with a
mass increase in this way. In particular, the tight binding energies of nuclei,

corresponding to the energy released in nuclear weapons, can be measured simply by

weighing nuclei of the elements involved.
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PDFNaturally

Accelerated Motion

Michael Fowler UVa Physics 10/09/08

Distance Covered in Uniform Acceleration

In the last lecture, we stated what we called Galileos acceleration hypothesis:
A falling body accelerates uniformly: it picks up equal amounts of speed in equal time intervals,
so that, if it falls from rest, it is moving twice as fast after two seconds as it was moving after one
second, and moving three times as fast after three seconds as it was after one second.
We also found, from the experiment, that a falling body will fall four times as far in twice the
time. That is to say, we found that the time to roll one-quarter of the way down the ramp was
one-half the time to roll all the way down.
Galileo asserted that the result of the rolling-down-the-ramp experiment confirmed his claim that
the acceleration was uniform. Let us now try to understand why this is so. The simplest way to
do this is to put in some numbers. Let us assume, for arguments sake, that the ramp is at a
convenient slope such that, after rolling down it for one second, the ball is moving at two meters
per second. This means that after two seconds it would be moving at four meters per second,
after three seconds at six meters per second and so on until it hits the end of the ramp. (Note: to
get an intuitive feel for these speeds, one meter per second is 3.6 km/hr, or 2.25 mph.)
To get a clear idea of whats happening, you should sketch a graph of how speed increases with
time. This is a straight line graph, beginning at zero speed at zero time, then going through a
point corresponding to two meters per second at time one second, four at two seconds and so on.
It sounds trivial, but is surprisingly helpful to have this graph in front of you as you readso,
find a piece of paper or an old envelope (this doesnt have to be too precise) and draw a line
along the bottom marked 0, 1, 2, for seconds of time, then a vertical line (or y-axis) indicating
speed at a given timethis could be marked 0, 2, 4, meters per second. Now, put in the points
(0,0), (1,2) and so on, and join them with a line.

From your graph, you can now read off its speed not just at 0, 1, 2 seconds, but at, say 1.5
seconds or 1.9 seconds or any other time within the time interval covered by the graph.
The hard part, though, is figuring out how far it moves in a given time. This is the core of
Galileos argument, and it is essential that you understand it before going further, so read the
next paragraphs slowly and carefully!
Let us ask a specific question: how far does it get in two seconds? If it were moving at a steady
speed of four meters per second for two seconds, it would of course move eight meters. But it
cant have gotten that far after two seconds, because it just attained the speed of four meters per
second when the time reached two seconds, so it was going at slower speeds up to that point. In
fact, at the very beginning, it was moving very slowly. Clearly, to figure out how far it travels
during that first two seconds what we must do is to find its average speed during that period.
This is where the assumption of uniform acceleration comes in. What it means is that the speed
starts from zero at the beginning of the period, increases at a constant rate, is two meters per
second after one second (half way through the period) and four meters per second after two
seconds, that is, at the end of the period we are considering. Notice that the speed is one meter
per second after half a second, and three meters per second after one-and-a-half seconds. From
the graph you should have drawn above of the speed as it varies in time, it should be evident that,
for this uniformly accelerated motion, the average speed over this two second interval is the
speed reached at half-time, that is, two meters per second.
Now, the distance covered in any time interval is equal to the average speed multiplied by the
time taken, so the distance traveled in two seconds is four metersthat is, two meters per second
for two seconds.
Now let us use the same argument to figure how far the ball rolls in just one second. At the end
of one second, it is moving at two meters per second. At the beginning of the second, it was at
rest. At the half-second point, the ball was moving at one meter per second. By the same
arguments as used above, then, the average speed during the first second was one meter per
second. Therefore, the total distance rolled during the first second is jus tone meter.
We can see from the above why, in uniform acceleration, the ball rolls four times as far when
the time interval doubles. If the average speed were the same for the two second period as for
the one second period, the distance covered would double since the ball rolls for twice as long a
time. But since the speed is steadily increasing, the average speed also doubles. It is the
combination of these two factorsmoving at twice the average speed for twice the timethat
gives the factor of four in distance covered!
It is not too difficult to show using these same arguments that the distances covered in 1, 2, 3,
4, ...seconds are proportional to 1, 4, 9, 16, .., that is, the squares of the times involved. This is
left as an exercise for the reader.

A Video Test of Galileos Hypothesis

In fact, using a video camera, we can check the hypothesis of uniform acceleration very directly
on a falling object. We drop the ball beside a meter stick with black and white stripes each ten
centimeters wide, so that on viewing the movie frame by frame, we can estimate where the ball
is at each frame. Furthermore, the camera has a built-in clockit films at thirty frames per
second. Therefore, we can constantly monitor the speed by measuring how many centimeters the
ball drops from one frame to the next. Since this measures distance traveled in one-thirtieth of a
second, we must multiply the distance dropped between frames by thirty to get the (average)
speed in that short time interval in centimeters per second.
By systematically going through all the frames showing the ball falling, and finding the
(average) speed for each time interval, we were able to draw a graph of speed against time. It
was a little rough, a result of our crude measuring of distance, but it was clear that speed was
increasing with time at a steady rate, and in fact we could measure the rate by finding the speed
reached after, say half a second. We found that, approximately, the rate of increase of speed was
ten meters (1,000 cms) per second in each second of fall, so after half a second it was moving at
about five meters per second, and after a quarter of a second it was going two and a half meters
per second.
This rate of increase of speed is the same for all falling bodies, neglecting the effect of air
resistance (and buoyancy for extremely light bodies such as balloons). It is called the
acceleration due to gravity, written g, and is actually close to 9.8 meters per second per second.
However, we shall take it to be 10 for convenience.

Throwing a Ball Upwards

To clarify ideas on the acceleration due to gravity, it is worth thinking about throwing a ball
vertically upwards. If we made another movie, we would find that the motion going upwards is
like a mirror image of that on the way down-the distances traveled between frames on the way
up get shorter and shorter. In fact, the ball on its way up loses speed at a steady rate, and the rate
turns out to be ten meters per second per second-the same as the rate of increase on the way
down. For example, if we throw the ball straight upwards at 20 meters per second (about 40
mph) after one second it will have slowed to 10 meters per second, and after two seconds it will
be at rest momentarily before beginning to come down. After a total of four seconds, it will be
back where it started.
An obvious question so: how high did it go? The way to approach this is to find its average
speed on the way up and multiply it by the time taken to get up. As before, it is helpful to sketch
a graph of how the speed is varying with time. The speed at the initial time is 20 meters per
second, at one second its down to 10, then at two seconds its zero. It is clear from the graph
that the average speed on the way up is 10 meters per second, and since it takes two seconds to
get up, the total distance traveled must be 20 meters.

Speed and Velocity

Let us now try to extend our speed plot to keep a record of the entire fall. The speed drops to
zero when the ball reaches the top, then begins to increase again. We could represent this by a Vshaped curve, but it turns out to be more natural to introduce the idea of velocity. Unfortunately
velocity and speed mean the same thing in ordinary usage, but in science velocity means more: it
includes speed and direction. In the case of a ball going straight up and down, we include
direction by saying that motion upwards has positive velocity, motion downwards has negative
velocity.
If we now plot the velocity of the ball at successive times, it is +20 initially, +10 after one
second, 0 after two seconds, -10 after three seconds, -20 after four seconds. If you plot this on a
graph you will see that it is all on the same straight line. Over each one-second interval, the
velocity decreases by ten meters per second throughout the flight. In other words, the
acceleration due to gravity is -10 meters per second per second, or you could say it is 10 meters
per second per second downwards.

Whats the Acceleration at the Topmost Point?

Most people on being asked that for the first time say zero. Thats wrong. But to see why takes
some clear thinking about just what is meant by velocity and acceleration. Recall Zeno claimed
motion was impossible because at each instant of time an object has to be in a particular position,
and since an interval of time is made up of instants, it could never move. The catch is that a
second of time cannot be built up of instants. It can, however, be built up of intervals of time
each as short as you wish. Average velocity over an interval of time is defined by dividing the
distance moved in that interval by the time taken---the length of the interval. We define velocity
at an instant of time, such as the velocity of the ball when the time is one second, by taking a
small time interval which includes the time one second, finding the average velocity over that
time interval, then repeating the process with smaller and smaller time intervals to home in on
the answer.
Now, to find acceleration at an instant of time we have to go through the same process.
Remember, acceleration is rate of change of velocity. So, to find the acceleration at an instant we
have to take some short but non-zero time interval that includes the point in question and find
how much the velocity changes during that time interval. Then we divide that velocity change
by the time it took to find the acceleration, in, say, meters per second per second.
The point is that at the topmost point of the throw, the ball does come to rest for an instant.
Before and after that instant, there is a brief period where the velocity is so small it looks as if the
ball is at rest. Also, our eyes tend to lock on the ball, so there is an illusion that the ball has zero
velocity for a short but non-zero period of time. But this isnt the case. The balls velocity is
always changing. To find its acceleration at the topmost point, we have to find how its velocity
changes in a short time interval which includes that point. If we took, for example, a period of
one-thousandth of a second, we would find the velocity to have changed by one centimeter per
second. So the ball would fall one two-thousandth of a centimeter during that first thousandth of

a second from rest-not too easy to see! The bottom line, though, is that the acceleration of the
ball is 10 meters per second per second downwards throughout the flight.
If you still find yourself thinking its got no acceleration at the top, maybe youre confusing
velocity with acceleration. All these words are used rather loosely in everyday life, but we are
forced to give them precise meanings to discuss motion unambiguously. In fact, lack of clarity
of definitions like this delayed understanding of these things for centuries.

The Motion of Projectiles

We follow fairly closely here the discussion of Galileo in Two New Sciences, Fourth Day, from
page 244 to the middle of page 257.
To analyze how projectiles move, Galileo describes two basic types of motion:
(i) Naturally accelerated vertical motion, which is the motion of a vertically falling body that we
have already discussed in detail.
(ii) Uniform horizontal motion, which he defines as straight-line horizontal motion which covers
equal distances in equal times.
This uniform horizontal motion, then, is just the familiar one of an automobile going at a steady
speed on a straight freeway. Galileo puts it as follows:
Imagine any particle projected along a horizontal plane without friction; then we know...that
this particle will move along this same plane with a motion that is uniform and perpetual,
provided the plane has no limits.
This simple statement is in itself a substantial advance on Aristotle, who thought that an
inanimate object could only continue to move as long as it was being pushed. Galileo realized
the crucial role played by friction: if there is no friction, he asserted, the motion will continue
indefinitely. Aristotles problem in this was that he observed friction-dominated systems, like
oxcarts, where motion stopped almost immediately when the ox stopped pulling. Recall that
Galileo, in the rolling a ball down a ramp experiment, went to great pains to get the ramp very
smooth, the ball very round, hard and polished. He knew that only in this way could he get
reliable, reproducible results. At the same time, it must have been evident to him that if the ramp
were to be laid flat, the ball would roll from one end to the other, after an initial push, with very
little loss of speed.

Compound Motion
Galileo introduces projectile motion by imagining that a ball, rolling in uniform horizontal
motion across a smooth tabletop, flies off the edge of the table. He asserts that when this
happens, the particles horizontal motion will continue at the same uniform rate, but, in addition,
it will acquire a downward vertical motion identical to that of any falling body. He refers to this
as a compound motion.

The simplest way to see what is going on is to study Galileos diagram on page 249, which we
reproduce here. For an animation, click here ! .
Imagine the ball to have been rolling across a tabletop moving to the left, passing the point a and
then going off the edge at the point b. Galileos figure shows its subsequent position at three
equal time intervals, say, 0.1 seconds, 0.2 seconds and 0.3 seconds after leaving the table, when
it will be at i, f, and h respectively.
The first point to notice is that the horizontal distance it has travelled from the table increases
uniformly with time: bd is just twice bc, and so on. That is to say, its horizontal motion is just
the same as if it had stayed on the table.
The second point is that its vertical motion is identical to that of a vertically falling body. In
other words, if another ball had been dropped vertically from b at the instant that our ball flew
off the edge there, they would always be at the same vertical height, so after 0.1 seconds when
the first ball reaches i, the dropped ball has fallen to o, and so on. It also follows, since we know
the falling body falls four times as far if the time is doubled, that bg is four times bo, so for the
projectile fd is four times ic. This can be stated in a slightly different way, which is the way
Galileo formulated it to prove the curve was a parabola:

The ratio of the vertical distances dropped in two different times, for example bg/bo, is always
the square of the ratio of the horizontal distances travelled in those times, in this case fg/io.
You can easily check that this is always true, from the rule of uniform acceleration of a falling
body. For example, bl is nine times bo, and hl is three times io.
Galileo proved, with a virtuoso display of Greek geometry, that the fact that the vertical drop was
proportional to the square of the horizontal distance meant that the trajectory was a parabola.
His definition of a parabola, the classic Greek definition, was that it was the intersection of a
cone with a plane parallel to one side of the cone. Starting from this definition of a parabola, it
takes quite a lot of work to establish that the trajectory is parabolic. However, if we define a
parabola as a curve of the form y = Cx then of course weve proved it already!
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Using Vectors to Describe Motion

Michael Fowler, University of Virginia

Uniform Motion in a Straight Line

Let us consider first the simple case of a car moving at a steady speed down a straight road.
Once weve agreed on the units we are using to measure speedsuch as miles per hour or
meters per second, or whatevera simple number, such as 55 (mph), tells us all there is to say in
describing steady speed motion. Well, actually, this is not quite allit doesnt tell us which way
(east or west, say) the car is moving. For some purposes, such as figuring gas consumption, this
is irrelevant, but if the aim of the trip is to get somewhere, as opposed to just driving around, it is
useful to know the direction as well as the speed.
To convey the direction as well as the speed, physicists make a distinction between two words
that mean the same thing in everyday life: speed and velocity.
Speed, in physics jargon, keeps its ordinary meaningit is simply a measure of how fast
somethings moving, and gives no clue about which direction its moving in.
Velocity, on the other hand, in physics jargon includes direction. For motion along a straight line,
velocity can be positive or negative. For a given situation, such as Charlottesville to Richmond,
we have to agree beforehand that one particular direction, such as away from Charlottesville,
counts as positive, so motion towards Charlottesville would then always be at a negative velocity
(but, of course, a positive speed, since speed is always positive, or zero).

Uniform Motion in a Plane

Now think about how you would describe quantitatively the motion of a smooth ball rolling
steadily on a flat smooth tabletop (so frictional effects are negligible, and we can take the speed
to be constant). Obviously, the first thing to specify is the speedhow fast is it moving, say in
meters per second? But next, we have to tackle how to give its direction of motion, and just
positive or negative wont do, since it could be moving at any angle to the table edge.

One approach to describing uniform motion in the plane is a sort of simplified version of
Galileos compound motion analysis of projectiles. One can think of the motion of the ball
rolling steadily across the table as being compounded of two motions, one a steady rolling
parallel to the length of the table, the other a steady rolling parallel to the width of the table. For
example, one could say that in its steady motion the ball is proceeding at a steady four meters per
second along the length of the table, and, at the same time, it is proceeding at a speed of three
meters per second parallel to the width of the table (this is a big table!). To visualize what this

means, think about where the ball is at some instant, then where it is one second later. It will
have moved four meters along the length of the table, and also three meters along the width.
How far did it actually move? And in what direction?
We can see that if the balls uniform motion is compounded of a steady velocity of 4 meters per
second parallel to the length of the table and a steady velocity of 3 meters per second parallel to
the width, as shown above, the actual distance the ball moves in one second is 5 meters
(remembering Pythagoras theorem, and in particular that a right angled triangle with the two
shorter sides 3 and 4 has the longest side 5we chose these numbers to make it easy). That is to
say, the speed of the ball is 5 meters per second.
What, exactly, is its velocity? As stated above, the velocity includes both speed and direction of
motion. The simplest and most natural way to represent direction is with an arrow. So, we
represent velocity by drawing an arrow in the plane indicating the direction the ball is rolling in.
We can see on the above representation of a table that this is the direction of the slanting line
arrow, which showed from where to where the ball moved in one second, obviously in the
direction of its velocity. Hence, we represent the direction of the velocity by drawing an arrow
pointing in that direction.
We can make the arrow represent the speed, as well, by agreeing on a rule for its length, such as
an arrow 1 cm long corresponds to a speed of 1 meter per second, one 2 cm long represents 2
meters per second, etc. These arrows are usually called vectors.
Let us agree that we represent velocities for the moment by arrows pointing in the direction of
motion, and an arrow 2 cm long corresponds to a speed of 1 meter per second. Then the velocity
of the ball, which is 5 meters per second in the direction of the slanting arrow above, is in fact
represented quantitatively by that arrow, since it has the right length10 cms. Recalling that we
began by saying the ball had a velocity 4 meters per second parallel to the length of the table, and
3 meters per second parallel to the width, we notice from the figure that these individual
velocities, which have to be added together to give the total velocity, can themselves be
represented by arrows (or vectors), and, in fact, are represented by the horizontal and vertical
arrows in the figure. All we are saying here is that the arrows showing how far the ball moves in
a given direction in one second also represent its velocity in that direction, because for uniform
motion velocity just means how far something moves in one second.
The total velocity of 5 meters per second in the direction of the dashed arrow can then be thought
of as the sum of the two velocities of 4 meters per second parallel to the length and 3 meters per
second parallel to the width. Of course, the speeds dont add.
Staring at the figure, we see the way to add these vectors is to place the tail of one of them at the
head of the other, then the sum is given by the vector from the other tail to the other head. In

other words, putting the two vectors together to form two sides of a triangle with the arrows
pointing around the triangle the same way, the sum of them is represented by the third side of the
triangle, but with the arrow pointing the other way.

Relative Velocities: a Child Running in a Train

As we shall see, relative velocities play an important role in relativity, so it is important to have a
clear understanding of this concept. As an example, consider a child running at 3 meters per
second (about 6 mph) in a train. The child is running parallel to the length of the train, towards
the front, and the train is moving down the track at 30 meters per second. What is the childs
velocity relative to the ground? It is 33 meters per second in the direction the train is moving
along the track (notice we always specify direction for a velocity). To really nail this down, you
should think through just how far the child moves relative to the ground in one secondthree
meters closer to the front of the train, and the train has covered 30 meters of ground.
A trickier point arises if the child is running across the train, from one side to the other. (This
run will only last about one second!) Again, the way to find the childs velocity relative to the
ground is to visualize how much ground the child covers in one secondthree meters in the
direction across the track, from one side to the other, plus thirty meters in the direction along the
track.

To find the total velocity, we now have to add two velocities at right angles, using the head to
tail rule for adding vectors. This is just the same problem as the ball rolling across the table at
an angle discussed above, and we need to use Pythagoras theorem to find the childs speed
relative to the ground.
Here is another example of vector addition, this time the two vectors to be added are not
perpendicular to each other, but the same rules apply:

So in the diagram above, the two vectors on the left add to give the vector on the right. To get a
bit less abstract, this could represent relative velocity in the following way: the big arrow on the
left might be the speed at which a person is swimming relative to water in a river, the little arrow
is the velocity at which the river water is moving over the river bed. then the vector sum of these
two represents the velocity of our swimmer relative to the river bed, which is what counts for
actually getting somewhere!
Exercise: Suppose you are swimming upstream at a speed relative to the water exactly equal to
the rate the water is flowing downstream, so youre staying over the same spot on the river bed.
Draw vectors representing your velocity relative to the water, the waters velocity relative to the
river bed, and your velocity relative to the river bed. From this trivial example, if I draw a vector
A, you can immediately draw -A, the vector which when added to A (using the rule for vector
addition stated above) gives zero.

Aristotles Law of Horizontal Motion

We restrict our considerations here to an object, such as an oxcart, moving in a horizontal plane.
Aristotle would say (with some justification) that it moves in the direction its being pushed (or
pulled), and with a speed proportional to the force being applied. Let us think about that in terms
of vectors. He is saying that the magnitude of the velocity of the object is proportional to the
applied force, and the direction of the velocity is the direction of the applied force. It seems
natural to conclude that not only is the velocity a vector, but so is the applied force! The applied

force certainly has magnitude (how hard are we pushing?) and direction, and can be represented
by an arrow (we would have to figure out some units of force if we want the length to represent
force quantitativelywe will come back to this later). But that isnt quite the whole storyan
essential property of vectors is that you can add them to each other, head to tail, as described
above. But if you have two forces acting on a body, is their total effect equivalent to that of a
force represented by adding together two arrows representing the individual forces head to tail?
It turns out that if the two forces act at the same point, the answer is yes, but this is a fact about
the physical world, and needs to be established experimentally. (It is not true in the subnuclear
world, where the forces of attraction between protons and neutrons in a nucleus are affected by
the presence of the other particles.)
So Aristotles rule for horizontal motion is: velocity is proportional to applied force.
This rule seems to work well for oxcarts, but doesnt make much sense for our ball rolling across
a smooth table, where, after the initial shove, there is no applied force in the direction of motion.

Galileos Law of Horizontal Motion

Galileos Law of Horizontal Motion can be deduced from his statement near the beginning of
Fourth day in Two New Sciences,
Imagine any particle projected along a horizontal plane without friction; then we know ... that
this particle will move along this same plane with a motion which is uniform and perpetual,
provided the plane has no limits.
So Galileos rule for horizontal motion is: velocity = constant, provided no force, including
friction, acts on the body.
The big advance from Aristotle here is Galileos realization that friction is an important part of
whats going on. He knows that if there were no friction, the ball would keep at a steady
velocity. The reason Aristotle thought it was necessary to apply a force to maintain constant
velocity was that he failed to identify the role of friction, and to realize that the force applied to
maintain constant velocity was just balancing the frictional loss. In contrast, Galileo realized the
friction acted as a drag force on the ball, and the external force necessary to maintain constant
motion just balanced this frictional drag force, so there was no total horizontal force on the ball.

Galileos Law of Vertical Motion

As we have already discussed at length, Galileos Law of Vertical Motion is:
For vertical motion: acceleration = constant (neglecting air resistance, etc.)

Describing Projectile Motion with Vectors

As an exercise in using vectors to represent velocities, consider the velocity of a cannonball shot
horizontally at 100 meters per second from the top of a cliff: what is the velocity after 1, 2, 3
seconds? As usual, neglect air resistance.
The initial velocity is represented by a horizontal arrow, which we take to be 10 cms long, for
convenience:

After one second, the downward velocity will have increased from zero to 10 meters per second,
as usual for a falling body. Thus, to find the total velocity after one second, we need to add to
the initial velocity, the vector above, a vertically downward vector of length 1 cm, to give the
right scale:

It is worth noting that although the velocity has visibly changed in this first second, the speed has
hardly changed at allremember the speed is represented by the length of the slanting vector,
which from Pythagoras theorem is the square root of 101 cms long, or about 10.05 cms, a very
tiny change. The velocity after two seconds would be given by adding two of the dashed
downward arrows head-to-tail to the initial horizontal arrow, and so on, so that after ten seconds,
if the cliff were high enough, the velocity would be pointing downwards at an angle of 45
degrees, and the speed by this point would have increased substantially.

Acceleration
Galileo defined naturally accelerated motion as downward motion in which speed increased at a
steady rate, giving rise to units for acceleration that look like a misprint, such as 10 meters per
second per second.

In everyday life, this is just what acceleration meanshow fast somethings picking up speed.
However, in physics jargon, acceleration (like velocity) has a more subtle meaning: the
acceleration of an object is its rate of change of velocity. From now on, this is what we mean
when we say acceleration.
At first this might seem to you a nitpicking change of definitionbut it isnt. Remember
velocity is a vector. It can change without its length changingit could just swing around and
point in a different direction. This means a body can accelerate without changing speed!
Why would we want to define acceleration in such a nonintuitive way? It almost seems as if we
are trying to make things difficult! It turns out that our new definition is what Galileo might call
the natural definition of acceleration. In the true laws of motion that describe things that happen
in the universe, as we shall discuss below, if a body has a net force acting on it, it accelerates.
But it doesnt necessarily change speedit might just swing its velocity around, in other words
veer off in a different direction. Therefore, as we shall see, this new definition of acceleration is
what we need to describe the real world.
For motion in a straight line, our definition is the same as Galileoswe agree, for example, that
the acceleration of a falling body is 10 meters per second per second downwards.
NOTE: the next topics covered in the course are the contributions of two very colorful
characters, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. I gave a more complete account of these two and
their works in an earlier version of this course. If you would like to read the more complete (and
more interesting) version, click on Tycho Brahe.
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Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler

(Condensed Version: see below for links to fuller version)
Michael Fowler University of Virginia
These two colorful characters made crucial contributions to our understanding of the universe:
Tychos observations were accurate enough for Kepler to discover that the planets moved in
elliptic orbits, and his other laws, which gave Newton the clues he needed to establish universal
inverse-square gravitation.
What you should know:

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), from a rich Danish noble family, was fascinated by astronomy, but
disappointed with the accuracy of tables of planetary motion at the time. He decided to dedicate
his life and considerable resources to recording planetary positions ten times more accurately
than the best previous work. After some early successes, and in gratitude for having his life
saved by Tychos uncle, the king of Denmark gave Tycho tremendous resources: an island with
many families on it, and money to build an observatory. (One estimate is that this was 10% of
the gross national product at the time!) Tycho built vast instruments to set accurate sights on the
stars, and used multiple clocks and timekeepers.
He achieved his goal of measuring to one minute of arc. This was a tremendous feat before the
invention of the telescope. His aim was to confirm his own picture of the universe, which was
that the earth was at rest, the sun went around the earth and the planets all went around the sun an intermediate picture between Ptolemy and Copernicus.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) believed in Copernicus picture. Having been raised in the Greek
geometric tradition, he believed God must have had some geometric reason for placing the six
planets at the particular distances from the sun that they occupied. He thought of their orbits as
being on spheres, one inside the other. One day, he suddenly remembered that there were just
five perfect Platonic solids, and this gave a reason for there being six planets - the orbit spheres
were maybe just such that between two successive ones a perfect solid would just fit. He
convinced himself that, given the uncertainties of observation at the time, this picture might be
the right one. However, that was before Tychos results were used. Kepler realized that Tychos
work could settle the question one way or the other, so he went to work with Tycho in 1600.
Tycho died the next year, Kepler stole the data, and worked with it for nine years.
He reluctantly concluded that his geometric scheme was wrong. In its place, he found his three
laws of planetary motion:
I

The planets move in elliptical orbits with the sun at a focus.

II In their orbits around the sun, the planets sweep out equal areas in equal times.
III The squares of the times to complete one orbit are proportional to the cubes of the average
distances from the sun.
These are the laws that Newton was able to use to establish universal gravitation.
Kepler was the first to state clearly that the way to understand the motion of the planets was in
terms of some kind of force from the sun. However, in contrast to Galileo, Kepler thought that a
continuous force was necessary to maintain motion, so he visualized the force from the sun like a
rotating spoke pushing the planet around its orbit.

On the other hand, Kepler did get right that the tides were caused by the moons gravity. Galileo
mocked him for this suggestion.
A much fuller treatment of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler can be found in my 1995 notes:
Links to: Tycho Brahe
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Isaac Newton

Michael Fowler, Physics Dept., U.Va.

Newtons Life
In 1642, the year Galileo died, Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England on
Christmas Day. His father had died three months earlier, and baby Isaac, very premature, was
also not expected to survive. It was said he could be fitted into a quart pot. When Isaac was
three, his mother married a wealthy elderly clergyman from the next village, and went to live
there, leaving Isaac behind with his grandmother. The clergyman died, and Isaacs mother came
back, after eight years, bringing with her three small children. Two years later, Newton went
away to the Grammar School in Grantham, where he lodged with the local apothecary, and was
fascinated by the chemicals. The plan was that at age seventeen he would come home and look
after the farm. He turned out to be a total failure as a farmer.
His mothers brother, a clergyman who had been an undergraduate at Cambridge, persuaded his
mother that it would be better for Isaac to go to university, so in 1661 he went up to Trinity
College, Cambridge. Isaac paid his way through college for the first three years by waiting
tables and cleaning rooms for the fellows (faculty) and the wealthier students. In 1664, he was
elected a scholar, guaranteeing four years of financial support. Unfortunately, at that time the
plague was spreading across Europe, and reached Cambridge in the summer of 1665. The
university closed, and Newton returned home, where he spent two years concentrating on
problems in mathematics and physics. He wrote later that during this time he first understood
the theory of gravitation, which we shall discuss below, and the theory of optics (he was the first
to realize that white light is made up of the colors of the rainbow), and much mathematics, both

integral and differential calculus and infinite series. However, he was always reluctant to publish
anything, at least until it appeared someone else might get credit for what he had found earlier.
On returning to Cambridge in 1667, he began to work on alchemy, but then in 1668 Nicolas
Mercator published a book containing some methods for dealing with infinite series. Newton
immediately wrote a treatise, De Analysi, expounding his own wider ranging results. His friend
and mentor Isaac Barrow communicated these discoveries to a London mathematician, but only
after some weeks would Newton allow his name to be given. This brought his work to the
attention of the mathematics community for the first time. Shortly afterwards, Barrow resigned
his Lucasian Professorship (which had been established only in 1663, with Barrow the first
incumbent) at Cambridge so that Newton could have the Chair.
Newtons first major public scientific achievement was the invention, design and construction of
a reflecting telescope. He ground the mirror, built the tube, and even made his own tools for the
job. This was a real advance in telescope technology, and ensured his election to membership in
the Royal Society. The mirror gave a sharper image than was possible with a large lens because
a lens focusses different colors at slightly different distances, an effect called chromatic
aberration. This problem is minimized nowadays by using compound lenses, two lenses of
different kinds of glass stuck together, that err in opposite directions, and thus tend to cancel each
others shortcomings, but mirrors are still used in large telescopes.
Later in the 1670s, Newton became very interested in theology. He studied Hebrew scholarship
and ancient and modern theologians at great length, and became convinced that Christianity had
departed from the original teachings of Christ. He felt unable to accept the current beliefs of the
Church of England, which was unfortunate because he was required as a Fellow of Trinity
College to take holy orders. Happily, the Church of England was more flexible than Galileo had
found the Catholic Church in these matters, and King Charles II issued a royal decree excusing
Newton from the necessity of taking holy orders! Actually, to prevent this being a wide
precedent, the decree specified that, in perpetuity, the Lucasian professor need not take holy
orders. (The current Lucasian professor is Stephen Hawking.)
In 1684, three members of the Royal Society, Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and Edmond
Halley, argued as to whether the elliptical orbits of the planets could result from a gravitational
force towards the sun proportional to the inverse square of the distance. Halley writes:
Mr. Hook said he had had it, but that he would conceal it for some time so that others, triing
and failing might know how to value it, when he should make it publick.
Halley went up to Cambridge, and put the problem to Newton, who said he had solved it four
years earlier, but couldnt find the proof among his papers. Three months later, he sent an
improved version of the proof to Halley, and devoted himself full time to developing these ideas,

culminating in the publication of the Principia in 1686. This was the book that really did change
mans view of the universe, as we shall shortly discuss, and its importance was fully appreciated
very quickly. Newton became a public figure. He left Cambridge for London, where he was
appointed Master of the Mint, a role he pursued energetically, as always, including prosecuting
counterfeiters. He was knighted by Queen Anne. He argued with Hooke about who deserved
credit for discovering the connection between elliptical orbits and the inverse square law until
Hooke died in 1703, and he argued with a German mathematician and philosopher, Leibniz,
about which of them invented calculus. Newton died in 1727, and was buried with much pomp
and circumstance in Westminster Abbeydespite his well-known reservations about the
Anglican faith.
An excellent, readable book is The Life of Isaac Newton, by Richard Westfall, Cambridge 1993,
which I used in writing the above summary of Newtons life.
A fascinating collection of articles, profusely illustrated, on Newtons life, work and impact on
the general culture is Let Newton Be!, edited by John Fauvel and others, Oxford 1988, which I
also consulted.

Projectiles and Planets

Let us now turn to the central topic of the Principia, the universality of the gravitational force.
The legend is that Newton saw an apple fall in his garden in Lincolnshire, thought of it in terms
of an attractive gravitational force towards the earth, and realized the same force might extend as
far as the moon. He was familiar with Galileos work on projectiles, and suggested that the
moons motion in orbit could be understood as a natural extension of that theory. To see what is
meant by this, consider a gun shooting a projectile horizontally from a very high mountain, and
imagine using more and more powder in successive shots to drive the projectile faster and faster.

The parabolic paths would become flatter and flatter, and, if we imagine that the mountain is so
high that air resistance can be ignored, and the gun is sufficiently powerful, eventually the point
of landing is so far away that we must consider the curvature of the earth in finding where it
lands.

In fact, the real situation is more dramaticthe earths curvature may mean the projectile never
lands at all. This was envisioned by Newton in the Principia. The following diagram is from
his later popularization, A Treatise of the System of the World, written in the 1680s:

The mountaintop at V is supposed to be above the earths atmosphere, and for a suitable initial
speed, the projectile orbits the earth in a circular path. In fact, the earths curvature is such that
the surface falls away below a truly flat horizontal line by about five meters in 8,000 meters (five
miles). Recall that five meters is just the vertical distance an initially horizontally moving
projectile will fall in the first second of motion. But this implies that if the (horizontal) muzzle
velocity were 8,000 meters per second, the downward fall of the cannonball would be just
matched by the earths surface falling away, and it would never hit the ground! This is just the
motion, familiar to us now, of a satellite in a low orbit, which travels at about 8,000 meters (five
miles) a second, or 18,000 miles per hour. (Actually, Newton drew this mountain impossibly
high, no doubt for clarity of illustration. A satellite launched horizontally from the top would be
far above the usual shuttle orbit, and go considerably more slowly than 18,000 miles per hour.)
For an animated version of Newtons cannon on a mountain, click here!

The Moon is Falling

Newton realized that the moons circular path around the earth could be caused in this way by
the same gravitational force that would hold such a cannonball in low orbit, in other words, the
same force that causes bodies to fall.
To think about this idea, let us consider the moons motion, beginning at some particular instant,
as deviating downwardsfallingfrom some initial horizontal line, just as for the cannonball
shot horizontally from a high mountain. The first obvious question is: does the moon fall five
meters below the horizontal line, that is, towards the earth, in the first second? This was not
difficult for Newton to check, because the path of the moon was precisely known by this time.
The moons orbit is approximately a circle of radius about 384,000 kilometers (240,000 miles),
which it goes around in a month (to be precise, in 27.3 days), so the distance covered in one
second is, conveniently, very close to one kilometer. It is then a matter of geometry to figure out
how far the curved path falls below a horizontal line in one second of flight, and the answer
turns out to be not five meters, but only a little over one millimeter! (Actually around 1.37
millimeters.)
Its completely impossible to draw a diagram showing how far it falls in one second, but the
geometry is the same if we look how far it falls in one day, so here it is:

For one second, AB would be only one kilometer, so since AC is 384,000 km., the triangle ABC
is really thin, but we can still use Pythagoras theorem!
Thus the natural acceleration of the moon towards the earth, measured by how far it falls
below straight line motion in one second, is less than that of an apple here on earth by the ratio of
five meters to 1.37 millimeters, which works out to be about 3,600.
What can be the significance of this much smaller rate of fall? Newtons answer was that the
natural acceleration of the moon was much smaller than that of the cannonball because they were
both caused by a forcea gravitational attraction towards the earth, and that the gravitational
force became weaker on going away from the earth.
In fact, the figures we have given about the moons orbit enable us to compute how fast the
gravitational attraction dies away with distance. The distance from the center of the earth to the
earths surface is about 6,350 kilometers (4,000 miles), so the moon is about 60 times further
from the center of the earth than we and the cannonball are.
From our discussion of how fast the moon falls below a straight line in one second in its orbit,
we found that the gravitational acceleration for the moon is down by a factor of 3,600 from the
cannonballs (or the apples).
Putting these two facts together, and noting that 3,600 = 60 x 60, led Newton to his famous
inverse square law: the force of gravitational attraction between two bodies decreases with
increasing distance between them as the inverse of the square of that distance, so if the distance
is doubled, the force is down by a factor of four.
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How Newton Built on Galileos Ideas

Michael Fowler, Physics Dept., U.Va.

We are now ready to move on to Newtons Laws of Motion, which for the first time
presented a completely coherent analysis of motion, making clear that the motion
in the heavens could be understood in the same terms as motion of ordinary objects
here on earth.

Acceleration Again
The crucial Second Law, as we shall see below, links the acceleration of a body with the force
acting on the body. To understand what it says, it is necessary to be completely clear what is
meant by acceleration, so let us briefly review.
Speed is just how fast somethings moving, so is fully specified by a positive number and
suitable units, such as 55 mph or 10 meters per second.
Velocity, on the other hand, means to a scientist more than speed---it also includes a specification
of the direction of the motion, so 55 mph to the northwest is a velocity. Usually wind velocities
are given in a weather forecast, since the direction of the wind affects future temperature changes
in a direct way. The standard way of representing a velocity in physics is with an arrow pointing
in the appropriate direction, its length representing the speed in suitable units. These arrows are
called vectors.
(WARNING: Notice, though, that for a moving object such as a projectile, both its position at a
given time (compared with where it started) and its velocity at that time can be represented by
vectors, so you must be clear what your arrow represents!)
Acceleration: as we have stated, acceleration is defined as rate of change of velocity.
It is not defined as rate of change of speed. A body can have nonzero acceleration while moving
at constant speed!

An Accelerating Body that isnt Changing Speed

Consider Newtons cannon on an imaginary high mountain above the atmosphere, that shoots a
ball so fast it circles the earth at a steady speed. Of course, its velocity is changing constantly,
because velocity includes direction.
Let us look at how its velocity changes over a period of one second. (Actually, in the diagram
below we exaggerate how far it would move in one second, the distance would in fact be onefive thousandth of the distance around the circle, impossible to draw.)

Here we show the cannonball (greatly exaggerated in size!) at two points in its orbit, and the
velocity vectors at those points. On the right, we show the two velocity vectors again, but we put
their ends together so that we can see the difference between them, which is the small dashed
vector.
In other words, the small dashed vector is the velocity that has to be added to the first velocity to
get the second velocity: it is the change in velocity on going around that bit of the orbit.
Now, if we think of the two points in the orbit as corresponding to positions of the cannonball
one second apart, the small dashed vector will represent the change in velocity in one second,
and that isby definitionthe acceleration. The acceleration is the rate of change of velocity,
and that is how much the velocity changes in one second (for motions that change reasonably
smoothly over the one-second period, which is certainly the case here. To find the rate of change
of velocity of a flys wing at some instant, we obviously would have to measure its velocity
change over some shorter interval, maybe a thousandth of a second).
So we see that, with our definition of acceleration as the rate of change of velocity, which is a
vector, a body moving at a steady speed around a circle is accelerating towards the center all the
time, although it never gets any closer to it. If this thought makes you uncomfortable, it is
because you are still thinking that acceleration must mean a change of speed, and just changing
direction doesnt count.

Finding the Acceleration in Circular Motion

It is possible to find an explicit expression for the magnitude of the acceleration towards the
center (sometimes called the centripetal acceleration) for a body moving on a circular path at
speed v. Look again at the diagram above showing two values of the velocity of the cannonball
one second apart. As is explained above, the magnitude a of the acceleration is the length of the
small dashed vector on the right, where the other two sides of this long narrow triangle have
lengths equal to the speed v of the cannonball. Well call this the vav triangle, because those
are the lengths of its sides. What about the angle between the two long sides? That is just the
angle the velocity vector turns through in one second as the cannonball moves around its orbit.
Now look over at the circle diagram on the left showing the cannonballs path. Label the
cannonballs position at the beginning of the second A, and at the end of the second B, so the
length AB is how far the cannonball travels in one second, that is, v. (Its true that the part of the
path AB is slightly curved, but we can safely ignore that very tiny effect.) Call the center of the
circle C. Draw the triangle ACB. (The reader should sketch the figure and actually draw these
triangles!) The two long sides AC and BC have lengths equal to the radius of the circular orbit.
We could call this long thin triangle an rvr triangle, since those are the lengths of its sides.

The important point to realize now is that the vav triangle and the rvr triangle are similar,
because since the velocity vector is always perpendicular to the radius line from the center of the
circle to the point where the cannonball is in orbit, the angle the velocity vector rotates by in one
second is the same as the angle the radius line turns through in one second. Therefore, the two
triangles are similar, and their corresponding sides are in the same ratios, that is, a/v = v/r. It
follows immediately that the magnitude of the acceleration a for an object moving at steady
speed v in a circle of radius r is v2/r directed towards the center of the circle.
This result is true for all circular motions, even those where the moving body goes round a large
part of the circle in one second. To establish it in a case like that, recall that the acceleration is
the rate of change of velocity, and we would have to pick a smaller time interval than one
second, so that the body didnt move far around the circle in the time chosen. If, for example, we
looked at two velocity vectors one-hundredth of a second apart, and they were pretty close, then
the acceleration would be given by the difference vector between them multiplied by onehundred, since acceleration is defined as what the velocity change in one second would be if it
continued to change at that rate. (In the circular motion situation, the acceleration is of course
changing all the time. To see why it is sometimes necessary to pick small time intervals,
consider what would happen if the body goes around the circle completely in one second. Then,
if you pick two times one second apart, you would conclude the velocity isnt changing at all, so
there is no acceleration.)

An Accelerating Body that isnt Moving

Weve stated before that a ball thrown vertically upwards has constant downward acceleration of
10 meters per second in each second, even when its at the very top and isnt moving at all. The
key point here is that acceleration is rate of change of velocity. You cant tell what the rate of
change of something is unless you know its value at more than one time. For example, speed on
a straight road is rate of change of distance from some given point. You cant get a speeding
ticket just for being at a particular point at a certain timethe cop has to prove that a short time
later you were at a point well removed from the first point, say, three meters away after one-tenth
of a second. That would establish that your speed was thirty meters per second, which is illegal
in a 55 m.p.h. zone. In just the same way that speed is rate of change of position, acceleration is
rate of change of velocity. Thus to find acceleration, you need to know velocity at two different
times. The ball thrown vertically upwards does have zero velocity at the top of its path, but that
is only at a single instant of time. One second later it is dropping at ten meters per second. One
millionth of a second after it reached the top, it is falling at one hundred-thousandth of a meter
per second. Both of these facts correspond to a downward acceleration, or rate of change of
velocity, of 10 meters per second in each second. It would only have zero acceleration if it
stayed at rest at the top for some finite period of time, so that you could say that its velocity
remained the samezerofor, say, a thousandth of a second, and during that period the rate of
change of velocity, the acceleration, would then of course be zero. Part of the problem is that the

speed is very small near the top, and also that our eyes tend to lock on to a moving object to see
it better, so there is the illusion that it comes to rest and stays there, even if not for long.

Galileos Analysis of Motion: Two Kinds

Galileos analysis of projectile motion was based on two concepts:
1. Naturally accelerated motion, describing the vertical component of motion, in which the
body picks up speed at a uniform rate.
2. Natural horizontal motion, which is motion at a steady speed in a straight line, and happens
to a ball rolling across a smooth table, for example, when frictional forces from surface or air can
be ignored.

Newton Puts Them Together

Newtons major breakthrough was to show that these two different kinds of motion can be
thought of as different aspects of the same thing. He did this by introducing the idea of motion
being affected by a force, then expressing this idea in a quantitative way. Galileo, of course, had
been well aware that motion is affected by external forces. Indeed, his definition of natural
horizontal motion explicitly states that it applies to the situation where such forces can be
neglected. He knew that friction would ultimately slow the ball down, andvery importanta
force pushing it from behind would cause it to accelerate. What he didnt say, though, and
Newton did, was that just as a force would cause acceleration in horizontal motion, the natural
acceleration actually observed in vertical motion must be the result of a vertical force on the
body, without which the natural vertical motion would also be at a constant speed, just like
natural horizontal motion. This vertical force is of course just the force of gravity.

Force is the Key

Therefore the point Newton is making is that the essential difference between Galileos natural
steady speed horizontal motion and the natural accelerated vertical motion is that vertically, there
is always the force of gravity acting, and without thatfor example far into spacethe natural
motion (that is, with no forces acting) in any direction would be at a steady speed in a straight
line.
(Actually, it took Newton some time to clarify the concept of force, which had previously been
unclear. This is discussed at length in Never at Rest, by Richard Westfall, and I have
summarized some of the points here.)

Newtons First Law: no Force, no Change in Motion

To put it in his own words (although actually he wrote it in Latin, this is from an 1803
translation):
Law 1
Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is
compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.
He immediately adds, tying this in precisely with Galileos work:
Projectiles persevere in their motions, so far as they are not retarded by the resistance of the air,
or impelled downwards by the force of gravity.
Notice that here persevere in their motions must mean in steady speed straight line motions,
because he is adding the gravitational acceleration on to this.
This is sometimes called The Law of Inertia: in the absence of an external force, a body in
motion will continue to move at constant speed and direction, that is, at constant velocity.
So any acceleration, or change in speed (or direction of motion), of a body signals that it is being
acted on by some force.

Newtons Second Law: Acceleration of a Body is Proportional to Force

Newtons next assertion, based on much experiment and observation, is that, for a given body,
the acceleration produced is proportional to the strength of the external force, so doubling the
external force will cause the body to pick up speed twice as fast.
Law 2
The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the
direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

What About Same Force, Different Bodies?

Another rather obvious point he doesnt bother to make is that for a given force, such as, for
example, the hardest you can push, applied to two different objects, say a wooden ball and a lead
ball of the same size, with the lead ball weighing seven times as much as the wooden ball, then
the lead ball will only pick up speed at one-seventh the rate the wooden one will.

Falling Bodies One More Time: What is Mass?

Now let us consider the significance of this law for falling bodies. Neglecting air resistance,
bodies of all masses accelerate downwards at the same rate. This was Galileos discovery.
Let us put this well established fact together with Newtons Second Law: the acceleration is
proportional to the external force, but inversely proportional to the mass of the body the force
acts on.
Consider two falling bodies, one having twice the mass of the other. Since their acceleration is
the same, the body having twice the mass must be experiencing a gravitational force which is
twice as strong. Of course, we are well aware of this, all its saying is that two bricks weigh
twice as much as one brick. Any weight measuring device, such as a bathroom scales, is just
measuring the force of gravity. However, this proportionality of mass and weight is not a
completely trivial point. Masses can be measured against each other without using gravity at all,
for example far into space, by comparing their relative accelerations when subject to a standard
force, a push. If one object accelerates at half the rate of another when subject to our standard
push, we conclude it has twice the mass. Thinking of the mass in this way as a measure of
resistance to having velocity changed by an outside force, Newton called it inertia. (Note that
this is a bit different from everyday speech, where we think of inertia as being displayed by
something that stays at rest. For Newton, steady motion in a straight line is the same as being at
rest. That seems perhaps counterintuitive, but thats because in ordinary life, steady motion in a
straight line usually causes some frictional or resistive forces to come into play).

Mass and Weight

To return to the concept of mass, it is really just a measure of the amount of stuff. For a uniform
material, such as water, or a uniform solid, the mass is the volume multiplied by the densitythe
density being defined as the mass of a unit of volume, so water, for example, has a density of one
gram per cubic centimeter, or sixty-two pounds per cubic foot.
Hence, from Galileos discovery of the uniform acceleration of all falling bodies, we conclude
that the weight of a body, which is the gravitational attraction it feels towards the earth, is
directly proportional to its mass, the amount of stuff its made of.

The Unit of Force

All the statements above about force, mass and acceleration are statements about proportionality.
We have said that for a body being accelerated by a force acting on it the acceleration is
proportional to the (total) external force acting on the body, and, for a given force, inversely
proportional to the mass of the body.

If we denote the force, mass and acceleration by F, m and a respectively (bearing in mind that
really F and a are vectors pointing in the same direction) we could write this:
F is proportional to ma

To make any progress in applying Newtons Laws in a real situation, we need to choose some
unit for measuring forces. We have already chosen units for mass (the kilogram) and
acceleration (meters per second per second). The most natural way to define our unit of force is:
The unit of force is that force which causes a unit mass (one kilogram) to accelerate with unit
acceleration (one meter per second per second).
This unit of force is named, appropriately, the newton.
If we now agree to measure forces in newtons, the statement of proportionality above can be
written as a simple equation:
F = ma

which is the usual statement of Newtons Second Law.

If a mass is now observed to accelerate, it is a trivial matter to find the total force acting on it.
The force will be in the direction of the acceleration, and its magnitude will be the product of the
mass and acceleration, measured in newtons. For example, a 3 kilogram falling body,
accelerating downwards at 10 meters per second per second, is being acted on by a force ma
equal to 30 newtons, which is, of course, its weight.

Newtons Third Law: Action and Reaction

Having established that a forcethe action of another bodywas necessary to cause a body to
change its state of motion, Newton made one further crucial observation: such forces always
arise as a mutual interaction of two bodies, and the other body also feels the force, but in the
opposite direction.
Law 3
To every action there is always opposed an equal and opposite reaction: or the mutual actions
of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.
Newton goes on:

Whatever draws or presses another is as much drawn or pressed by that other. If you press a
stone with your finger, the finger is also pressed by the stone. If a horse draws a stone tied to a
rope, the horse (if I may so say) will be equally drawn back towards the stone: for the distended
rope, by the same endeavour to relax or unbend itself, will draw the horse as much towards the
stone, as it does the stone towards the horse, and will obstruct the progress of the one as much
as it advances that of the other. If a body impinge upon another, and by its force change the
motion of the other, that body also (because of the equality of the mutual pressure) will undergo
an equal change, in its own motion, towards the contrary part. The changes made by these
actions are equal, not in the velocities but in the motions of bodies; that is to say, if the bodies
are not hindered by any other impediments. For, because the motions are equally changed, the
changes of the velocities made towards contrary parts are reciprocally proportional to the
bodies. This law takes place also in attractions.
All this maybe sounds kind of obvious. Anyone whos had a dog on a leash, especially a big
dog, is well aware that tension in a rope pulls both ways. If you push against a wall, the wall is
pushing you back. If thats difficult to visualize, imagine what would happen if the wall
suddenly evaporated. Newtons insight here, his realization that every acting force has a reacting
force, and that acceleration of a body only occurs when an external force acts on it, was one of
the big forward steps in our understanding of how the Universe works.

Newtons Second Law in Everyday Life

The Second Law states that if a body is accelerating, there must be an external force acting on it.
Its not always obvious what this external force is even in the most trivial everyday occurrences.
Suppose youre standing still, then begin to walk. What was the external force that caused you to
accelerate? Think about that for a while. Heres a clue: its very hard to start walking if youre
wearing smooth-bottomed shoes and standing on smooth ice. You tend to skid around in the
same place. If you understand that, you also know what external force operates when a car
accelerates.
The reason the external force causing the acceleration may not be immediately evident is that it
may not be whats doing the work. Consider the following scenario: you are standing on level
ground, on rollerskates, facing a wall with your palms pressed against it. You push against the
wall, and roll away backwards. You accelerated. Clearly, you did the work that caused the
acceleration. But from Newtons second law, your acceleration was, in fact, caused by the
reactive external force of the wall pushing your hands, and hence the rest of you. That is to say,
the force causing the acceleration may not be generated directly by whator whois doing the
work! In this example, its generated indirectly, as a reaction force to that of the hands pushing
on the wall. But if the wall were on wheels, and it accelerated away when you pushed (having
taken off your roller skates) the force causing the acceleration of the wall would be generated
directly by the agent doing the work, you.

Now imagine two people on roller skates, standing close facing each other, palms raised and
pushing the other person away. According to Newtons discussion above following his Third
Law, the two bodies involved will undergo equal changes of motion, but to contrary parts, that is,
in opposite directions. That sounds reasonable. They obviously both move off backwards.
Notice, however, that Newton makes a special point of the fact that these equal (but opposite)
motions do not imply equal (but opposite) velocitiesthis becomes obvious when you
imagine the experiment with a 100 pound person and a 200 pound person. Newton tells us that
in that situation the heavier person will roll backwards at half the speednotice he says the
velocities are reciprocally proportional to the bodies.
Roller skates actually provide a pretty good example of the necessity of generating an external
force if you want to accelerate. If you keep the skates pointing strictly forwards, and only the
wheels are in contact with the ground, its difficult to get going. The way you start is to turn the
skates some, so that there is some sideways push on the wheels. Since the wheels cant turn
sideways, you are thus able to push against the ground, and therefore it is pushing youyouve
managed to generate the necessary external force to accelerate you. Note that if the wheels were
to be replaced by ball bearings somehow, you wouldnt get anywhere, unless you provided some
other way for the ground to push you, such as a ski pole, or maybe twisting your foot so that
some fixed part of the skate contacted the ground.

Gravity
We have now reached the last sentence in Newtons discussion of his Third Law: This law also
takes place in attractions. This of course is central to Newtons (and our) view of the Universe.
If the Earth is attracting the Moon gravitationally with a certain force holding it in its orbit, then
the Moon is attracting the Earth with an equal force. So why isnt the Earth going around the
Moon? The answer is that the masses are so different. The Earths mass is more than one
hundred times that of the Moon. Consequently, the Earths acceleration, falling towards the
Moon, is very small. What actually happens is that they both circle around a balance point
between them, which in fact lies within the Earth. This motion of the Earth is easily detectable
with instruments, but tiny compared with the daily rotation. Of course, it also follows from the
above considerations that since the Earth is attracting you downwards with a force equal to your
weight, you are attracting the Earth upwardstowards youwith a force of exactly the same
strength.

The Law of Gravity

Let us now put together what we know about the gravitational force:
1. The gravitational force on a body (its weight, at the Earths surface) is proportional to its
mass.

2. If a body A attracts a body B with a gravitational force of a given strength, then B attracts A
with a force of equal strength in the opposite direction.
3. The gravitational attraction between two bodies decreases with distance, being proportional to
the inverse square of the distance between them. That is, if the distance is doubled, the
gravitational attraction falls to a quarter of what it was.
One interesting point herethink about how the earth is gravitationally attracting you. Actually,
all the different parts of the earth are attracting you! Mount Everest is pulling you one way, the
Antarctic ice mass a different way, and the earths core is pulling you downwards. Newton
managed to prove, after thinking about it for years, that if the earth is a sphere (which is a very
good approximation) then all these different attractions add up to what you would feel if all the
earths mass were concentrated in one point at the center. So, when were talking about the
gravitational attraction between you and the earth, and we talk about the distance of separation,
we mean the distance between you and the center of the earth, which is just less than four
thousand miles (6300 kilometers).
Lets denote the gravitational attractive force between two bodies A and B (as mentioned in item
2 above) by F. The forces on the two bodies are really equal and opposite vectors, each pointing
to the other body, so our letter F means the length of these vectors, the strength of the force of
attraction.
Now, item 1 tells us that the gravitational attraction between the earth and a mass m is
proportional to m. This is an immediate consequence of the experimental fact that falling bodies
accelerate at the same rate, usually written g (approximately 10 meters per second per second),
and the definition of force from Newtons Second Law above. Thus we have
F is proportional to mass m

for the earths gravitational attraction on a body (often written weight W = mg), and Newton
generalized this finding to assert that this proportionality to mass would be true for any
gravitational attraction on the body.
From the symmetry of the force (item 2 above) and the proportionality to the mass (item 1), it
follows that the gravitational force between two bodies must be proportional to both masses. So,
if we double both masses, say, the gravitational attraction between them increases by a factor of
four. We see that if the force is proportional to both masses, lets call them M and m, it is
actually proportional to the product Mm of the masses. From item 3 above, the force is also
proportional to 1/r2, where r is the distance between the bodies, so for the gravitational attractive
force between two bodies
F is proportional to Mm/r2

This must mean that by measuring the gravitational force on something, we should be able to
figure out the mass of the Earth! But theres a catchall we know is that the force is
proportional to the Earths mass. From that we could find, for instance, the ratio of the mass of
the Earth to the mass of Jupiter, by comparing how fast the Moon is falling around the Earth to
how fast Jupiters moons are falling around Jupiter. For that matter, we could find the ratio of
the Earths mass to the Suns mass by seeing how fast the planets swing around the Sun. Still,
knowing all these ratios doesnt tell us the Earths mass in tons. It does tell us that if we find that
out, we can then find the masses of the other planets, at least those that have moons, and the
mass of the Sun.

Weighing the Earth

So how do we measure the mass of the Earth? The only way is to compare the Earths
gravitational attraction with that of something we already know the mass of. We dont know the
masses of any of the heavenly bodies. What this really means is that we have to take a known
mass, such as a lead ball, and measure how strongly it attracts a smaller lead ball, say, and
compare that force with the earths attraction for the smaller lead ball. This is very difficult to
accomplish because the forces are so small, but it was done successfully in 1798, just over a
century after Newtons work, by Cavendish.
In other words, Cavendish took two lead weights M and m, a few kilograms each, and actually
detected the tiny gravitational attraction between them (of order of magnitude millionths of a
newton)! This was a sufficiently tough experiment that even now, two hundred years later, its
not easy to give a lecture demonstration of the effect.
Making this measurement amounts to finding the constant of proportionality in the statement
about F above, so that we can sharpen it up from a statement about proportionality to an actual
useable equation,
F = GMm/r2

where the constant G is what Cavendish measured, and found to be 6.67 x 10-11 in the appropriate
units, where the masses are in kilograms, the distance in meters and the force in newtons.
(Notice here that we cant get rid of the constant of proportionality G, as we did in the equation
F = ma, Newtons Second Law, above. We succeeded there by defining the unit of force
appropriately. In the present case, we have already defined our units of mass, distance and force,
so we have no further room to maneuver.)
From Newtons theory of universal gravitational attraction, the same constant G determines the
gravitational attraction between any two masses in the universe. This means we can now find
the mass of the earth. We just consider a one kilogram mass at the earths surface. We know it

feels a force of approximately 10 newtons, and is a distance of about 6300 km, or 6,300,000
meters, from the center of the earth. So we know every term in the above equation except the
mass of the earth, and therefore can find it. This is left as an exercise.
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The Speed of Light

Michael Fowler, UVa Physics Department

Early Ideas about Light Propagation

As we shall soon see, attempts to measure the speed of light played an important part in the
development of the theory of special relativity, and, indeed, the speed of light is central to the
theory.
The first recorded discussion of the speed of light (I think) is in Aristotle, where he quotes
Empedocles as saying the light from the sun must take some time to reach the earth, but Aristotle
himself apparently disagrees, and even Descartes thought that light traveled instantaneously.
Galileo, unfairly as usual, in Two New Sciences (page 42) has Simplicio stating the Aristotelian
position,
SIMP. Everyday experience shows that the propagation of light is instantaneous; for when we
see a piece of artillery fired at great distance, the flash reaches our eyes without lapse of time;
but the sound reaches the ear only after a noticeable interval.
Of course, Galileo points out that in fact nothing about the speed of light can be deduced from
this observation, except that light moves faster than sound. He then goes on to suggest a possible
way to measure the speed of light. The idea is to have two people far away from each other, with
covered lanterns. One uncovers his lantern, then the other immediately uncovers his on seeing
the light from the first. This routine is to be practised with the two close together, so they will
get used to the reaction times involved, then they are to do it two or three miles apart, or even
further using telescopes, to see if the time interval is perceptibly lengthened. Galileo claims he
actually tried the experiment at distances less than a mile, and couldnt detect a time lag. From
this one can certainly deduce that light travels at least ten times faster than sound.

Measuring the Speed of Light with Jupiters Moons

The first real measurement of the speed of light came about half a century later, in 1676, by a
Danish astronomer, Ole Rmer, working at the Paris Observatory. He had made a systematic
study of Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, which was eclipsed by Jupiter at regular intervals, as Io
went around Jupiter in a circular orbit at a steady rate. Actually, Rmer found, for several
months the eclipses lagged more and more behind the expected time, but then they began to pick
up again. In September 1676,he correctly predicted that an eclipse on November 9 would be 10
minutes behind schedule. This was indeed the case, to the surprise of his skeptical colleagues at
the Royal Observatory in Paris. Two weeks later, he told them what was happening: as the Earth
and Jupiter moved in their orbits, the distance between them varied. The light from Io (actually
reflected sunlight, of course) took time to reach the earth, and took the longest time when the
earth was furthest away. When the Earth was furthest from Jupiter, there was an extra distance
for light to travel equal to the diameter of the Earths orbit compared with the point of closest
approach. The observed eclipses were furthest behind the predicted times when the earth was
furthest from Jupiter.
From his observations, Rmer concluded that light took about twenty-two minutes to cross the
earths orbit. This was something of an overestimate, and a few years later Newton wrote in the
Principia (Book I, section XIV): For it is now certain from the phenomena of Jupiters
satellites, confirmed by the observations of different astronomers, that light is propagated in
succession (note: I think this means at finite speed) and requires about seven or eight minutes to
travel from the sun to the earth. This is essentially the correct value.
Of course, to find the speed of light it was also necessary to know the distance from the earth to
the sun. During the 1670s, attempts were made to measure the parallax of Mars, that is, how far
it shifted against the background of distant stars when viewed simultaneously from two different
places on earth at the same time. This (very slight) shift could be used to find the distance of
Mars from earth, and hence the distance to the sun, since all relative distances in the solar system
had been established by observation and geometrical analysis. According to Crowe (Modern
Theories of the Universe, Dover, 1994, page 30), they concluded that the distance to the sun was
between 40 and 90 million miles. Measurements presumably converged on the correct value of
about 93 million miles soon after that, because it appears Rmer (or perhaps Huygens, using
Rmers data a short time later) used the correct value for the distance, since the speed of light
was calculated to be 125,000 miles per second, about three-quarters of the correct value of
186,300 miles per second. This error is fully accounted for by taking the time light needs to
cross the earths orbit to be twenty-two minutes (as Rmer did) instead of the correct value of
sixteen minutes.

Starlight and Rain

The next substantial improvement in measuring the speed of light took place in 1728, in
England. An astronomer James Bradley, sailing on the Thames with some friends, noticed that
the little pennant on top of the mast changed position each time the boat put about, even though
the wind was steady. He thought of the boat as the earth in orbit, the wind as starlight coming
from some distant star, and reasoned that the apparent direction the starlight was blowing in
would depend on the way the earth was moving. Another possible analogy is to imagine the
starlight as a steady downpour of rain on a windless day, and to think of yourself as walking
around a circular path at a steady pace. The apparent direction of the incoming rain will not be
vertically downwardsmore will hit your front than your back. In fact, if the rain is falling at,
say, 15 mph, and you are walking at 3 mph, to you as observer the rain will be coming down at a
slant so that it has a vertical speed of 15 mph, and a horizontal speed towards you of 3 mph.
Whether it is slanting down from the north or east or whatever at any given time depends on
where you are on the circular path at that moment. Bradley reasoned that the apparent direction
of incoming starlight must vary in just this way, but the angular change would be a lot less
dramatic. The earths speed in orbit is about 18 miles per second, he knew from Rmers work
that light went at about 10,000 times that speed. That meant that the angular variation in
apparent incoming direction of starlight was about the magnitude of the small angle in a rightangled triangle with one side 10,000 times longer than the other, about one two-hundredth of a
degree. Notice this would have been just at the limits of Tychos measurements, but the advent
of the telescope, and general improvements in engineering, meant this small angle was quite
accurately measurable by Bradleys time, and he found the velocity of light to be 185,000 miles
per second, with an accuracy of about one percent.

Fast Flickering Lanterns

The problem is, all these astronomical techniques do not have the appeal of Galileos idea of two
guys with lanterns. It would be reassuring to measure the speed of a beam of light between two
points on the ground, rather than making somewhat indirect deductions based on apparent slight
variations in the positions of stars. We can see, though, that if the two lanterns are ten miles
apart, the time lag is of order one-ten thousandth of a second, and it is difficult to see how to
arrange that. This technical problem was solved in France about 1850 by two rivals, Fizeau and
Foucault, using slightly different techniques. In Fizeaus apparatus, a beam of light shone
between the teeth of a rapidly rotating toothed wheel, so the lantern was constantly being
covered and uncovered. Instead of a second lantern far away, Fizeau simply had a mirror,
reflecting the beam back, where it passed a second time between the teeth of the wheel. The idea
was, the blip of light that went out through one gap between teeth would only make it back
through the same gap if the teeth had not had time to move over significantly during the round
trip time to the far away mirror. It was not difficult to make a wheel with a hundred teeth, and to
rotate it hundreds of times a second, so the time for a tooth to move over could be arranged to be

a fraction of one ten thousandth of a second. The method worked. Foucaults method was based
on the same general idea, but instead of a toothed wheel, he shone the beam on to a rotating
mirror. At one point in the mirrors rotation, the reflected beam fell on a distant mirror, which
reflected it right back to the rotating mirror, which meanwhile had turned through a small angle.
After this second reflection from the rotating mirror, the position of the beam was carefully
measured. This made it possible to figure out how far the mirror had turned during the time it
took the light to make the round trip to the distant mirror, and since the rate of rotation of the
mirror was known, the speed of light could be figured out. These techniques gave the speed of
light with an accuracy of about 1,000 miles per second.

Albert Abraham Michelson

Albert Michelson was born in 1852 in Strzelno, Poland. His father Samuel was a Jewish
merchant, not a very safe thing to be at the time. Purges of Jews were frequent in the
neighboring towns and villages. They decided to leave town. Alberts fourth birthday was
celebrated in Murphys Camp, Calaveras County, about fifty miles south east of Sacramento, a
place where five million dollars worth of gold dust was taken from one four acre lot. Samuel
prospered selling supplies to the miners. When the gold ran out, the Michelsons moved to
Virginia City, Nevada, on the Comstock lode, a silver mining town. Albert went to high school
in San Francisco. In 1869, his father spotted an announcement in the local paper that
Congressman Fitch would be appointing a candidate to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and
inviting applications. Albert applied but did not get the appointment, which went instead to the
son of a civil war veteran. However, Albert knew that President Grant would also be appointing
ten candidates himself, so he went east on the just opened continental railroad to try his luck.
Unknown to Michelson, Congressman Fitch wrote directly to Grant on his behalf, saying this
would really help get the Nevada Jews into the Republican party. This argument proved
persuasive. In fact, by the time Michelson met with Grant, all ten scholarships had been
awarded, but the President somehow came up with another one. Of the incoming class of ninetytwo, four years later twenty-nine graduated. Michelson placed first in optics, but twenty-fifth in
seamanship. The Superintendent of the Academy, Rear Admiral Worden, who had commanded
the Monitor in its victory over the Merrimac, told Michelson: If in the future youd give less
attention to those scientific things and more to your naval gunnery, there might come a time
when you would know enough to be of some service to your country.

Sailing the Silent Seas: Galilean Relativity

Shortly after graduation, Michelson was ordered aboard the USS Monongahela, a sailing ship,
for a voyage through the Carribean and down to Rio. According to the biography of Michelson
written by his daughter (The Master of Light, by Dorothy Michelson Livingston, Chicago, 1973)
he thought a lot as the ship glided across the quiet Caribbean about whether one could decide in a

closed room inside the ship whether or not the vessel was moving. In fact, his daughter quotes a
famous passage from Galileo on just this point:
[SALV.] Shut yourself up with some friend in the largest room below decks of some large ship
and there procure gnats, flies, and other such small winged creatures. Also get a great tub full of
water and within it put certain fishes; let also a certain bottle be hung up, which drop by drop
lets forth its water into another narrow-necked bottle placed underneath. Then, the ship lying
still, observe how those small winged animals fly with like velocity towards all parts of the room;
how the fish swim indifferently towards all sides; and how the distilling drops all fall into the
bottle placed underneath. And casting anything toward your friend, you need not throw it with
more force one way than another, provided the distances be equal; and leaping with your legs
together, you will reach as far one way as another. Having observed all these particulars,
though no man doubts that, so long as the vessel stands still, they ought to take place in this
manner, make the ship move with what velocity you please, so long as the motion is uniform and
not fluctuating this way and that. You will not be able to discern the least alteration in all the
forenamed effects, nor can you gather by any of them whether the ship moves or stands still. ...in
throwing something to your friend you do not need to throw harder if he is towards the front of
the ship from you... the drops from the upper bottle still fall into the lower bottle even though the
ship may have moved many feet while the drop is in the air ... Of this correspondence of effects
the cause is that the ships motion is common to all the things contained in it and to the air also;
I mean if those things be shut up in the room; but in case those things were above the deck in the
open air, and not obliged to follow the course of the ship, differences would be observed, ...
smoke would stay behind... .
[SAGR.] Though it did not occur to me to try any of this out when I was at sea, I am sure you are
right. I remember being in my cabin wondering a hundred times whether the ship was moving or
not, and sometimes I imagined it to be moving one way when in fact it was moving the other way.
I am therefore satisfied that no experiment that can be done in a closed cabin can determine the
speed or direction of motion of a ship in steady motion.
I have paraphrased this last remark somewhat to clarify it. This conclusion of Galileos, that
everything looks the same in a closed room moving at a steady speed as it does in a closed room
at rest, is called The Principle of Galilean Relativity. We shall be coming back to it.

Michelson Measures the Speed of Light

On returning to Annapolis from the cruise, Michelson was commissioned Ensign, and in 1875
became an instructor in physics and chemistry at the Naval Academy, under Lieutenant
Commander William Sampson. Michelson met Mrs. Sampsons niece, Margaret Heminway,
daughter of a very successful Wall Street tycoon, who had built himself a granite castle in New
Rochelle, NY. Michelson married Margaret in an Episcopal service in New Rochelle in 1877.

At work, lecture demonstrations had just been introduced at Annapolis. Sampson suggested that
it would be a good demonstration to measure the speed of light by Foucaults method.
Michelson soon realized, on putting together the apparatus, that he could redesign it for much
greater accuracy, but that would need money well beyond that available in the teaching
demonstration budget. He went and talked with his father in law, who agreed to put up $2,000.
Instead of Foucaults 60 feet to the far mirror, Michelson had about 2,000 feet along the bank of
the Severn, a distance he measured to one tenth of an inch. He invested in very high quality
lenses and mirrors to focus and reflect the beam. His final result was 186,355 miles per second,
with possible error of 30 miles per second or so. This was twenty times more accurate than
Foucault, made the New York Times, and Michelson was famous while still in his twenties. In
fact, this was accepted as the most accurate measurement of the speed of light for the next forty
years, at which point Michelson measured it again.
The next lecture is on the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the aether.
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The Michelson-Morley Experiment

Spanish Version

Flashlet of the Experiment!

Michael Fowler U. Va. Physics 9/15/08

The Nature of Light

As a result of Michelsons efforts in 1879, the speed of light was known to be 186,350 miles per
second with a likely error of around 30 miles per second. This measurement, made by timing a
flash of light travelling between mirrors in Annapolis, agreed well with less direct measurements
based on astronomical observations. Still, this did not really clarify the nature of light. Two
hundred years earlier, Newton had suggested that light consists of tiny particles generated in a
hot object, which spray out at very high speed, bounce off other objects, and are detected by our
eyes. Newtons arch-enemy Robert Hooke, on the other hand, thought that light must be a kind
of wave motion, like sound. To appreciate his point of view, let us briefly review the nature of
sound.

The Wavelike Nature of Sound

Actually, sound was already quite well understood by the ancient Greeks. The essential point
they had realized is that sound is generated by a vibrating material object, such as a bell, a string
or a drumhead. Their explanation was that the vibrating drumhead, for example, alternately
pushes and pulls on the air directly above it, sending out waves of compression and
decompression (known as rarefaction), like the expanding circles of ripples from a disturbance
on the surface of a pond. On reaching the ear, these waves push and pull on the eardrum with the
same frequency (that is to say, the same number of pushes per second) as the original source was
vibrating at, and nerves transmit from the ear to the brain both the intensity (loudness) and
frequency (pitch) of the sound.
There are a couple of special properties of sound waves (actually any waves) worth mentioning
at this point. The first is called interference. This is most simply demonstrated with water
waves. If you put two fingers in a tub of water, just touching the surface a foot or so apart, and
vibrate them at the same rate to get two expanding circles of ripples, you will notice that where
the ripples overlap there are quite complicated patterns of waves formed. The essential point is
that at those places where the wave-crests from the two sources arrive at the same time, the
waves will work together and the water will be very disturbed, but at points where the crest from
one source arrives at the same time as the wave trough from the other source, the waves will
cancel each other out, and the water will hardly move. You can hear this effect for sound waves
by playing a constant note through stereo speakers. As you move around a room, you will hear
quite large variations in the intensity of sound. Of course, reflections from walls complicate the
pattern. This large variation in volume is not very noticeable when the stereo is playing music,
because music is made up of many frequencies, and they change all the time. The different
frequencies, or notes, have their quiet spots in the room in different places. The other point that
should be mentioned is that high frequency tweeter-like sound is much more directional than low
frequency woofer-like sound. It really doesnt matter where in the room you put a lowfrequency wooferthe sound seems to be all around you anyway. On the other hand, it is quite
difficult to get a speaker to spread the high notes in all directions. If you listen to a cheap
speaker, the high notes are loudest if the speaker is pointing right at you. A lot of effort has gone
into designing tweeters, which are small speakers especially designed to broadcast high notes
over a wide angle of directions.
Is Light a Wave?

Bearing in mind the above minireview of the properties of waves, let us now reconsider the
question of whether light consists of a stream of particles or is some kind of wave. The strongest
argument for a particle picture is that light travels in straight lines. You can hear around a corner,
at least to some extent, but you certainly cant see. Furthermore, no wave-like interference
effects are very evident for light. Finally, it was long known, as we have mentioned, that sound
waves were compressional waves in air. If light is a wave, just what is waving? It clearly isnt

just air, because light reaches us from the sun, and indeed from stars, and we know the air
doesnt stretch that far, or the planets would long ago have been slowed down by air resistance.
Despite all these objections, it was established around 1800 that light is in fact some kind of
wave. The reason this fact had gone undetected for so long was that the wavelength is really
short, about one fifty-thousandth of an inch. In contrast, the shortest wavelength sound
detectable by humans has a wavelength of about half an inch. The fact that light travels in
straight lines is in accord with observations on sound that the higher the frequency (and shorter
the wavelength) the greater the tendency to go in straight lines. Similarly, the interference
patterns mentioned above for sound waves or ripples on a pond vary over distances of the same
sort of size as the wavelengths involved. Patterns like that would not normally be noticeable for
light because they would be on such a tiny scale. In fact, it turns out, there are ways to see
interference effects with light. A familiar example is the many colors often visible in a soap
bubble. These come about because looking at a soap bubble you see light reflected from both
sides of a very thin film of watera thickness that turns out to be comparable to the wavelength
of light. The light reflected from the lower layer has to go a little further to reach your eye, so
that light wave must wave an extra time or two before getting to your eye compared with the
light reflected from the top layer. What you actually see is the sum of the light reflected from the
top layer and that reflected from the bottom layer. Thinking of this now as the sum of two sets of
waves, the light will be bright if the crests of the two waves arrive together, dim if the crests of
waves reflected from the top layer arrive simultaneously with the troughs of waves reflected
from the bottom layer. Which of these two possibilities actually occurs for reflection from a
particular bit of the soap film depends on just how much further the light reflected from the
lower surface has to travel to reach your eye compared with light from the upper surface, and
that depends on the angle of reflection and the thickness of the film. Suppose now we shine
white light on the bubble. White light is made up of all the colors of the rainbow, and these
different colors have different wavelengths, so we see colors reflected, because for a particular
film, at a particular angle, some colors will be reflected brightly (the crests will arrive together),
some dimly, and we will see the ones that win.
If Light is a Wave, What is Waving?

Having established that light is a wave, though, we still havent answered one of the major
objections raised above. Just what is waving? We discussed sound waves as waves of
compression in air. Actually, that is only one casesound will also travel through liquids, like
water, and solids, like a steel bar. It is found experimentally that, other things being equal, sound
travels faster through a medium that is harder to compress: the material just springs back faster
and the wave moves through more rapidly. For media of equal springiness, the sound goes faster
through the less heavy medium, essentially because the same amount of springiness can push
things along faster in a lighter material. So when a sound wave passes, the materialair, water
or solidwaves as it goes through. Taking this as a hint, it was natural to suppose that light
must be just waves in some mysterious material, which was called the aether, surrounding and

permeating everything. This aether must also fill all of space, out to the stars, because we can
see them, so the medium must be there to carry the light. (We could never hear an explosion on
the moon, however loud, because there is no air to carry the sound to us.) Let us think a bit
about what properties this aether must have. Since light travels so fast, it must be very light, and
very hard to compress. Yet, as mentioned above, it must allow solid bodies to pass through it
freely, without aether resistance, or the planets would be slowing down. Thus we can picture it
as a kind of ghostly wind blowing through the earth. But how can we prove any of this? Can we
detect it?
Detecting the Aether Wind: the Michelson-Morley Experiment

Detecting the aether wind was the next challenge Michelson set himself after his triumph in
measuring the speed of light so accurately. Naturally, something that allows solid bodies to pass
through it freely is a little hard to get a grip on. But Michelson realized that, just as the speed of
sound is relative to the air, so the speed of light must be relative to the aether. This must mean, if
you could measure the speed of light accurately enough, you could measure the speed of light
travelling upwind, and compare it with the speed of light travelling downwind, and the difference
of the two measurements should be twice the windspeed. Unfortunately, it wasnt that easy. All
the recent accurate measurements had used light travelling to a distant mirror and coming back,
so if there was an aether wind along the direction between the mirrors, it would have opposite
effects on the two parts of the measurement, leaving a very small overall effect. There was no
technically feasible way to do a one-way determination of the speed of light.
At this point, Michelson had a very clever idea for detecting the aether wind. As he explained to
his children (according to his daughter), it was based on the following puzzle:
Suppose we have a river of width w (say, 100 feet), and two swimmers who both swim at the
same speed v feet per second (say, 5 feet per second). The river is flowing at a steady rate, say 3
feet per second. The swimmers race in the following way: they both start at the same point on
one bank. One swims directly across the river to the closest point on the opposite bank, then
turns around and swims back. The other stays on one side of the river, swimming upstream a
distance (measured along the bank) exactly equal to the width of the river, then swims back to
the start. Who wins?
Lets consider first the swimmer going upstream and back. Going 100 feet upstream, the speed
relative to the bank is only 2 feet per second, so that takes 50 seconds. Coming back, the speed
is 8 feet per second, so it takes 12.5 seconds, for a total time of 62.5 seconds.

The swimmer going across the flow is trickier. It wont do simply to aim directly for the
opposite bank-the flow will carry the swimmer downstream. To succeed in going directly across,
the swimmer must actually aim upstream at the correct angle (of course, a real swimmer would
do this automatically). Thus, the swimmer is going at 5 feet per second, at an angle, relative to
the river, and being carried downstream at a rate of 3 feet per second. If the angle is correctly
chosen so that the net movement is directly across, in one second the swimmer must have moved
four feet across: the distances covered in one second will form a 3,4,5 triangle. So, at a crossing
rate of 4 feet per second, the swimmer gets across in 25 seconds, and back in the same time, for a
total time of 50 seconds. The cross-stream swimmer wins. This turns out to true whatever their
swimming speed. (Of course, the race is only possible if they can swim faster than the current!)

Michelsons great idea was to construct an exactly similar race for pulses of light, with the aether
wind playing the part of the river. The scheme of the experiment is as follows: a pulse of light is
directed at an angle of 45 degrees at a half-silvered, half transparent mirror, so that half the pulse
goes on through the glass, half is reflected. These two half-pulses are the two swimmers. They
both go on to distant mirrors which reflect them back to the half-silvered mirror. At this point,
they are again half reflected and half transmitted, but a telescope is placed behind the halfsilvered mirror as shown in the figure so that half of each half-pulse will arrive in this telescope.
Now, if there is an aether wind blowing, someone looking through the telescope should see the
halves of the two half-pulses to arrive at slightly different times, since one would have gone
more upstream and back, one more across stream in general. To maximize the effect, the whole
apparatus, including the distant mirrors, was placed on a large turntable so it could be swung
around.
An animated flashlet of the experiment is available hereit makes the account above a lot
clearer!
Let us think about what kind of time delay we expect to find between the arrival of the two halfpulses of light. Taking the speed of light to be c miles per second relative to the aether, and the
aether to be flowing at v miles per second through the laboratory, to go a distance w miles
upstream will take w/(c-v) seconds, then to come back will take w/(c+v) seconds. The total
roundtrip time upstream and downstream is the sum of these, which works out to be 2wc/(c-v),
which can also be written (2w/c)1/(1-v/c). Now, we can safely assume the speed of the aether
is much less than the speed of light, otherwise it would have been noticed long ago, for example

in timing of eclipses of Jupiters satellites. This means v/c is a very small number, and we can
use some handy mathematical facts to make the algebra a bit easier. First, if x is very small
compared to 1, 1/(1-x) is very close to 1+x. (You can check it with your calculator.) Another
fact we shall need in a minute is that for small x, the square root of 1+x is very close to 1+x/2.

Putting all this together,

upstream-downstream roundtrip time

2w
v 2
1 2 .
c
c

Now, what about the cross-stream time? The actual cross-stream speed must be figured out as in
the example above using a right-angled triangle, with the hypoteneuse equal to the speed c, the
shortest side the aether flow speed v, and the other side the cross-stream speed we need to find
the time to get across. From Pythagoras theorem, then, the cross-stream speed is the square root
of (c-v).
Since this will be the same both ways, the roundtrip cross-stream time will be

2w / c2 v2 .
This can be written in the form

2w
1
2w
1
2w
v2

c 1 v2 / c2
c 1 v 2 / 2c 2
c
2c 2
where the two successive approximations, valid for v / c x = 1, are

1 x 1 x / 2

and

1/ 1 x 1 x.
Therefore the

cross-stream roundtrip time

2w
v2
1 2 .
c
2c

Looking at the two roundtrip times at the ends of the two paragraphs above, we see that they
differ by an amount (2w/c) v/2c. Now, 2w/c is just the time the light would take if there were
no aether wind at all, say, a few millionths of a second. If we take the aether windspeed to be
equal to the earths speed in orbit, for example, v/c is about 1/10,000, so v/c is about
1/100,000,000. This means the time delay between the pulses reflected from the different
mirrors reaching the telescope is about one-hundred-millionth of a few millionths of a second. It
seems completely hopeless that such a short time delay could be detected. However, this turns
out not to be the case, and Michelson was the first to figure out how to do it. The trick is to use
the interference properties of the lightwaves. Instead of sending pulses of light, as we discussed
above, Michelson sent in a steady beam of light of a single color. This can be visualized as a
sequence of ingoing waves, with a wavelength one fifty-thousandth of an inch or so. Now this
sequence of waves is split into two, and reflected as previously described. One set of waves goes
upstream and downstream, the other goes across stream and back. Finally, they come together
into the telescope and the eye. If the one that took longer is half a wavelength behind, its troughs
will be on top of the crests of the first wave, they will cancel, and nothing will be seen. If the
delay is less than that, there will still be some dimming. However, slight errors in the placement
of the mirrors would have the same effect. This is one reason why the apparatus is built to be
rotated. On turning it through 90 degrees, the upstream-downstream and the cross-stream waves
change places. Now the other one should be behind. Thus, if there is an aether wind, if you
watch through the telescope while you rotate the turntable, you should expect to see variations in
the brightness of the incoming light.
To magnify the time difference between the two paths, in the actual experiment the light was
reflected backwards and forwards several times, like a several lap race. For a diagram, click
here. For an actual photograph of the real apparatus, click here.
Michelson calculated that an aether windspeed of only one or two miles a second would have
observable effects in this experiment, so if the aether windspeed was comparable to the earths

speed in orbit around the sun, it would be easy to see. In fact, nothing was observed. The light
intensity did not vary at all. Some time later, the experiment was redesigned so that an aether
wind caused by the earths daily rotation could be detected. Again, nothing was seen. Finally,
Michelson wondered if the aether was somehow getting stuck to the earth, like the air in a belowdecks cabin on a ship, so he redid the experiment on top of a high mountain in California. Again,
no aether wind was observed. It was difficult to believe that the aether in the immediate vicinity
of the earth was stuck to it and moving with it, because light rays from stars would deflect as
they went from the moving faraway aether to the local stuck aether.
The only possible conclusion from this series of very difficult experiments was that the whole
concept of an all-pervading aether was wrong from the start. Michelson was very reluctant to
think along these lines. In fact, new theoretical insight into the nature of light had arisen in the
1860s from the brilliant theoretical work of Maxwell, who had written down a set of equations
describing how electric and magnetic fields can give rise to each other. He had discovered that
his equations predicted there could be waves made up of electric and magnetic fields, and the
speed of these waves, deduced from experiments on how these fields link together, would be
186,300 miles per second. This is, of course, the speed of light, so it is natural to assume that
light is made up of fast-varying electric and magnetic fields. But this leads to a big problem:
Maxwells equations predict a definite speed for light, and it is the speed found by
measurements. But what is the speed to be measured relative to? The whole point of bringing in
the aether was to give a picture for light resembling the one we understand for sound,
compressional waves in a medium. The speed of sound through air is measured relative to air. If
the wind is blowing towards you from the source of sound, you will hear the sound sooner. If
there isnt an aether, though, this analogy doesnt hold up. So what does light travel at 186,300
miles per second relative to?
There is another obvious possibility, which is called the emitter theory: the light travels at
186,300 miles per second relative to the source of the light. The analogy here is between light
emitted by a source and bullets emitted by a machine gun. The bullets come out at a definite
speed (called the muzzle velocity) relative to the barrel of the gun. If the gun is mounted on the
front of a tank, which is moving forward, and the gun is pointing forward, then relative to the
ground the bullets are moving faster than they would if shot from a tank at rest. The simplest
way to test the emitter theory of light, then, is to measure the speed of light emitted in the
forward direction by a flashlight moving in the forward direction, and see if it exceeds the known
speed of light by an amount equal to the speed of the flashlight. Actually, this kind of direct test
of the emitter theory only became experimentally feasible in the nineteen-sixties. It is now
possible to produce particles, called neutral pions, which decay each one in a little explosion,
emitting a flash of light. It is also possible to have these pions moving forward at 185,000 miles
per second when they self destruct, and to catch the light emitted in the forward direction, and
clock its speed. It is found that, despite the expected boost from being emitted by a very fast
source, the light from the little explosions is going forward at the usual speed of 186,300 miles

per second. In the last century, the emitter theory was rejected because it was thought the
appearance of certain astronomical phenomena, such as double stars, where two stars rotate
around each other, would be affected. Those arguments have since been criticized, but the pion
test is unambiguous. The definitive experiment was carried out by Alvager et al., Physics Letters
12, 260 (1964).
Einsteins Answer

The results of the various experiments discussed above seem to leave us really stuck. Apparently
light is not like sound, with a definite speed relative to some underlying medium. However, it is
also not like bullets, with a definite speed relative to the source of the light. Yet when we
measure its speed we always get the same result. How can all these facts be interpreted in a
simple consistent way? We shall show how Einstein answered this question in the next lecture.
A detailed guide to setting up a Michelson-Morley experiment can be found at Nantes
University.
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Special Relativity
Michael Fowler, UVa Physics 3/3/08
Galilean Relativity again

At this point in the course, we finally enter the twentieth centuryAlbert Einstein wrote his first
paper on relativity in 1905. To put his work in context, let us first review just what is meant by
relativity in physics. The first example, mentioned in a previous lecture, is what is called
Galilean relativity and is nothing but Galileos perception that by observing the motion of
objects, alive or dead, in a closed room there is no way to tell if the room is at rest or is in fact in
a boat moving at a steady speed in a fixed direction. (You can tell if the room is accelerating or
turning around.) Everything looks the same in a room in steady motion as it does in a room at
rest. After Newton formulated his Laws of Motion, describing how bodies move in response to
forces and so on, physicists reformulated Galileos observation in a slightly more technical, but
equivalent, way: they said the laws of physics are the same in a uniformly moving room as they
are in a room at rest. In other words, the same force produces the same acceleration, and an
object experiencing no force moves at a steady speed in a straight line in either case. Of course,
talking in these terms implies that we have clocks and rulers available so that we can actually

time the motion of a body over a measured distance, so the physicist envisions the room in
question to have calibrations along all the walls, so the position of anything can be measured,
and a good clock to time motion. Such a suitably equipped room is called a frame of
referencethe calibrations on the walls are seen as a frame which you can use to specify the
precise position of an object at a given time. (This is the same as a set of coordinates.)
Anyway, the bottom line is that no amount of measuring of motions of objects in the frame of
reference will tell you whether this is a frame at rest or one moving at a steady velocity.
What exactly do we mean by a frame at rest anyway? This seems obvious from our
perspective as creatures who live on the surface of the earthwe mean, of course, at rest relative
to fixed objects on the earths surface. Actually, the earths rotation means this isnt quite a fixed
frame, and also the earth is moving in orbit at 18 miles per second. From an astronauts point of
view, then, a frame fixed relative to the sun might seem more reasonable. But why stop there?
We believe the laws of physics are good throughout the universe. Let us consider somewhere in
space far from the sun, even far from our galaxy. We would see galaxies in all directions, all
moving in different ways. Suppose we now set up a frame of reference and check that Newtons
laws still work. In particular, we check that the First Law holdsthat a body experiencing no
force moves at a steady speed in a straight line. This First law is often referred to as The
Principle of Inertia, and a frame in which it holds is called an Inertial Frame. Then we set up
another frame of reference, moving at a steady velocity relative to the first one, and find that
Newtons laws are o.k. in this frame too. The point to notice here is that it is not at all obvious
whichif eitherof these frames is at rest. We can, however, assert that they are both
inertial frames, after weve checked that in both of them, a body with no forces acting on it
moves at a steady speed in a straight line (the speed could be zero). In this situation, Michelson
would have said that a frame at rest is one at rest relative to the aether. However, his own
experiment found motion through the aether to be undetectable, so how would we ever know we
were in the right frame?
As we mentioned in the last lecture, in the middle of the nineteenth century there was a
substantial advance in the understanding of electric and magnetic fields. (In fact, this advance is
in large part responsible for the improvement in living standards since that time.) The new
understanding was summarized in a set of equations called Maxwells equations describing how
electric and magnetic fields interact and give rise to each other, just as, two centuries earlier, the
new understanding of dynamics was summarized in the set of equations called Newtons laws.
The important thing about Maxwells equations for our present purposes is that they predicted
waves made up of electric and magnetic fields that moved at 3108 meters per second, and it was
immediately realized that this was no coincidencelight waves must be nothing but waving
electric and magnetic fields. (This is now fully established to be the case.)
It is worth emphasizing that Maxwells work predicted the speed of light from the results of
experiments that were not thought at the time they were done to have anything to do with light

experiments on, for example, the strength of electric field produced by waving a magnet.
Maxwell was able to deduce a speed for waves like this using methods analogous to those by
which earlier scientists had figured out the speed of sound from a knowledge of the density and
the springiness of air.
Generalizing Galilean Relativity to Include Light: Special Relativity

We now come to Einsteins major insight: the Theory of Special Relativity. It is deceptively
simple. Einstein first dusted off Galileos discussion of experiments below decks on a uniformly
moving ship, and restated it as :
The Laws of Physics are the same in all Inertial Frames.

Einstein then simply brought this up to date, by pointing out that the Laws of Physics must now
include Maxwells equations describing electric and magnetic fields as well as Newtons laws
describing motion of masses under gravity and other forces. (Note for experts and the curious:
we shall find that Maxwells equations are completely unaltered by special relativity, but, as will
become clear later, Newtons Laws do need a bit of readjustment to include special relativistic
phenomena. The First Law is still o.k., the Second Law in the form F = ma is not, because we
shall find mass varies; we need to equate force to rate of change of momentum (Newton
understood that, of coursethats the way he stated the law!). The Third Law, stated as action
equals reaction, no longer holds because if a body moves, its electric field, say, does not readjust
instantaneouslya ripple travels outwards at the speed of light. Before the ripple reaches
another charged body, the electric forces between the two will be unbalanced. However, the
crucial consequence of the Third Lawthe conservation of momentum when two bodies
interact, still holds. It turns out that the rippling field itself carries momentum, and everything
balances.)
Demanding that Maxwells equations be satisfied in all inertial frames has one major
consequence as far as we are concerned. As we stated above, Maxwells equations give the speed
of light to be 3108 meters per second. Therefore, demanding that the laws of physics are the
same in all inertial frames implies that the speed of any light wave, measured in any inertial
frame, must be 3108 meters per second.
This then is the entire content of the Theory of Special Relativity: the Laws of Physics are the
same in any inertial frame, and, in particular, any measurement of the speed of light in any
inertial frame will always give 3108 meters per second.
You Really Cant Tell Youre Moving!

Just as Galileo had asserted that observing gnats, fish and dripping bottles, throwing things and
generally jumping around would not help you to find out if you were in a room at rest or moving
at a steady velocity, Einstein added that no kind of observation at all, even measuring the speed

of light across your room to any accuracy you like, would help find out if your room was really
at rest. This implies, of course, that the concept of being at rest is meaningless. If Einstein is
right, there is no natural rest-frame in the universe. Naturally, there can be no aether, no thin
transparent jelly filling space and vibrating with light waves, because if there were, it would
provide the natural rest frame, and affect the speed of light as measured in other moving inertial
frames as discussed above.
So we see the Michelson-Morley experiment was doomed from the start. There never was an
aether wind. The light was not slowed down by going upstreamlight always travels at the
same speed, which we shall now call c,
c = 3108 meters per second

to save writing it out every time. This now answers the question of what the speed of light, c, is
relative to. We already found that it is not like sound, relative to some underlying medium. It is
also not like bullets, relative to the source of the light (the discredited emitter theory). Light
travels at c relative to the observer, since if the observer sets up an inertial frame (clocks, rulers,
etc.) to measure the speed of light he will find it to be c. (We always assume our observers are
very competent experimentalists!)
Truth and Consequences

The Truth we are referring to here is the seemingly innocuous and plausible sounding statement
that all inertial frames are as good as each otherthe laws of physics are the same in all of them
and so the speed of light is the same in all of them. As we shall soon see, this Special Theory
of Relativity has some surprising consequences, which reveal themselves most dramatically
when things are moving at relative speeds comparable to the speed of light. Einstein liked to
explain his theory using what he called thought experiments involving trains and other kinds of
transportation moving at these speeds (technically unachievable so far!), and we shall follow his
general approach.
To begin with, let us consider a simple measurement of the speed of light carried out at the same
time in two inertial frames moving at half the speed of light relative to each other. The setup is
as follows: on a flat piece of ground, we have a flashlight which emits a blip of light, like a
strobe. We have two photocells, devices which click and send a message down a wire when light
falls on them. The photocells are placed 10 meters apart in the path of the blip of light, they are
somehow wired into a clock so that the time taken by the blip of light to travel from the first
photocell to the second, in other words, the time between clicks, can be measured. From this
time and the known distance between them, we can easily find the speed of the blip of light.

Meanwhile, there is another observer, passing overhead in a spaceship traveling at half the speed
of light. She is also equipped with a couple of photocells, placed 10 meters apart on the bottom
of her spaceship as shown, and she is able to measure the speed of the same blip of light, relative
to her frame of reference (the spaceship). The observer on the spaceship will measure the blip of
light to be traveling at c relative to the spaceship, the observer on the ground will measure the
same blip to be traveling at c relative to the ground. That is the unavoidable consequence of the
Theory of Relativity.
(Note: actually the picture above is not quite the way it would really look. As we shall find,
objects moving at relativistic speeds are contracted, and this combined with the different times
light takes to reach the eye from different parts of the ship would change the ships appearance.
But this does not affect the validity of the statements above.)
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Special Relativity: What Time is it?

Michael Fowler, Physics Department, UVa.

Special Relativity in a Nutshell

Einsteins Theory of Special Relativity, discussed in the last lecture, may be summarized as
follows:
The Laws of Physics are the same in any Inertial Frame of Reference. (Such frames move at
steady velocities with respect to each other.)
These Laws include in particular Maxwells Equations describing electric and magnetic fields,
which predict that light always travels at a particular speed c, equal to about 3108 meters per
second, that is,186,300 miles per second.
It follows that any measurement of the speed of any flash of light by any observer in any
inertial frame will give the same answer c.

We have already noted one counter-intuitive consequence of this, that two different observers
moving relative to each other, each measuring the speed of the same blob of light relative to
himself, will both get c, even if their relative motion is in the same direction as the motion of the
blob of light.
We shall now explore how this simple assumption changes everything we thought we understood
about time and space.
A Simple but Reliable Clock

We mentioned earlier that each of our (inertial) frames of reference is calibrated (had marks at
regular intervals along the walls) to measure distances, and has a clock to measure time. Let us
now get more specific about the clockwe want one that is easy to understand in any frame of
reference. Instead of a pendulum swinging back and forth, which wouldnt work away from the
earths surface anyway, we have a blip of light bouncing back and forth between two mirrors
facing each other. We call this device a light clock. To really use it as a timing device we need
some way to count the bounces, so we position a photocell at the upper mirror, so that it catches
the edge of the blip of light. The photocell clicks when the light hits it, and this regular series of
clicks drives the clock hand around, just as for an ordinary clock. Of course, driving the
photocell will eventually use up the blip of light, so we also need some provision to reinforce the
blip occasionally, such as a strobe light set to flash just as it passes and thus add to the intensity
of the light. Admittedly, this may not be an easy way to build a clock, but the basic idea is
simple.

Its easy to figure out how frequently our light clock clicks. If the two mirrors are a distance w
apart, the round trip distance for the blip from the photocell mirror to the other mirror and back is
2w. Since we know the blip always travels at c, we find the round trip time to be 2w/c, so this is
the time between clicks. This isnt a very long time for a reasonable sized clock! The crystal in
a quartz watch clicks of the order of 10,000 times a second. That would correspond to mirrors
about nine miles apart, so we need our clock to click about 1,000 times faster than that to get to a
reasonable size. Anyway, let us assume that such purely technical problems have been solved.
Looking at Somebody Elses Clock

Let us now consider two observers, Jack and Jill, each equipped with a calibrated inertial frame
of reference, and a light clock. To be specific, imagine Jack standing on the ground with his light
clock next to a straight railroad line, while Jill and her clock are on a large flatbed railroad wagon
which is moving down the track at a constant speed v. Jack now decides to check Jills light
clock against his own. He knows the time for his clock is 2w/c between clicks. Imagine it to be a
slightly misty day, so with binoculars he can actually see the blip of light bouncing between the

mirrors of Jills clock. How long does he think that blip takes to make a round trip? The one
thing hes sure of is that it must be moving at c = 186,300 miles per second, relative to him
thats what Einstein tells him. So to find the round trip time, all he needs is the round trip
distance. This will not be 2w, because the mirrors are on the flatbed wagon moving down the
track, so, relative to Jack on the ground, when the blip gets back to the top mirror, that mirror has
moved down the track some since the blip left, so the blip actually follows a zigzag path as seen
from the ground.

Suppose now the blip in Jills clock on the moving flatbed wagon takes time t to get from the
bottom mirror to the top mirror as measured by Jack standing by the track. Then the length of the
zig from the bottom mirror to the top mirror is necessarily ct, since that is the distance covered
by any blip of light in time t. Meanwhile, the wagon has moved down the track a distance vt,
where v is the speed of the wagon. This should begin to look familiarit is precisely the same as
the problem of the swimmer who swims at speed c relative to the water crossing a river flowing
at v! We have again a right-angled triangle with hypotenuse ct, and shorter sides vt and w.
From Pythagoras, then,
ct = vt + w

so
t(c - v) = w

or
t(1 - v/c) = w/c

and, taking the square root of each side, then doubling to get the round trip time, we conclude
that Jack sees the time between clicks for Jills clock to be:
time between clicks for moving clock

2w
1
.
c 1 v2 / c2

Of course, this gives the right answer 2w/c for a clock at rest, that is, v = 0.

This means that Jack sees Jills light clock to be going slowa longer time between clicks
compared to his own identical clock. Obviously, the effect is not dramatic at real railroad speeds.
2
2
The correction factor is 1 v / c , which differs from 1 by about one part in a trillion even for
a bullet train! Nevertheless, the effect is real and can be measured, as we shall discuss later.

It is important to realize that the only reason we chose a light clock, as opposed to some other
kind of clock, is that its motion is very easy to analyze from a different frame. Jill could have a
collection of clocks on the wagon, and would synchronize them all. For example, she could
hang her wristwatch right next to the face of the light clock, and observe them together to be sure
they always showed the same time. Remember, in her frame her light clock clicks every 2w/c
seconds, as it is designed to do. Observing this scene from his position beside the track, Jack
will see the synchronized light clock and wristwatch next to each other, and, of course, note that

2
2
the wristwatch is also running slow by the factor 1 v / c . In fact, all her clocks, including
her pulse, are slowed down by this factor according to Jack. Jill is aging more slowly because
shes moving!

But this isnt the whole storywe must now turn everything around and look at it from Jills
point of view. Her inertial frame of reference is just as good as Jacks. She sees his light clock
to be moving at speed v (backwards) so from her point of view his light blip takes the longer
zigzag path, which means his clock runs slower than hers. That is to say, each of them will see
the other to have slower clocks, and be aging more slowly. This phenomenon is called time
dilation. It has been verified in recent years by flying very accurate clocks around the world on
jetliners and finding they register less time, by the predicted amount, than identical clocks left on
the ground. Time dilation is also very easy to observe in elementary particle physics, as we shall
discuss in the next section.
Fitzgerald Contraction

Consider now the following puzzle: suppose Jills clock is equipped with a device that stamps a
notch on the track once a second. How far apart are the notches? From Jills point of view, this
is pretty easy to answer. She sees the track passing under the wagon at v meters per second, so
the notches will of course be v meters apart. But Jack sees things differently. He sees Jills
clocks to be running slow, so he will see the notches to be stamped on the track at intervals of

1/ 1 v 2 / c 2 seconds (so for a relativistic train going at v = 0.8c, the notches are stamped at
intervals of 5/3 = 1.67 seconds). Since Jack agrees with Jill that the relative speed of the wagon
2
2
and the track is v, he will assert the notches are not v meters apart, but v / 1 v / c meters
apart, a greater distance. Who is right? It turns out that Jack is right, because the notches are in
his frame of reference, so he can wander over to them with a tape measure or whatever, and
check the distance. This implies that as a result of her motion, Jill observes the notches to be
2
2
closer together by a factor 1 v / c than they would be at rest. This is called the Fitzgerald
contraction, and applies not just to the notches, but also to the track and to Jackeverything
looks somewhat squashed in the direction of motion!

Experimental Evidence for Time Dilation: Dying Muons

The first clear example of time dilation was provided over fifty years ago by an experiment
detecting muons. (David H. Frisch and James A. Smith, Measurement of the Relativistic Time
Dilation Using Muons, American Journal of Physics, 31, 342, 1963). These particles are
produced at the outer edge of our atmosphere by incoming cosmic rays hitting the first traces of
air. They are unstable particles, with a half-life of 1.5 microseconds (1.5 millionths of a
second), which means that if at a given time you have 100 of them, 1.5 microseconds later you
will have about 50, 1.5 microseconds after that 25, and so on. Anyway, they are constantly being

produced many miles up, and there is a constant rain of them towards the surface of the earth,
moving at very close to the speed of light. In 1941, a detector placed near the top of Mount
Washington (at 6000 feet above sea level) measured about 570 muons per hour coming in. Now
these muons are raining down from above, but dying as they fall, so if we move the detector to a
lower altitude we expect it to detect fewer muons because a fraction of those that came down
past the 6000 foot level will die before they get to a lower altitude detector. Approximating their
speed by that of light, they are raining down at 186,300 miles per second, which turns out to be,
conveniently, about 1,000 feet per microsecond. Thus they should reach the 4500 foot level 1.5
microseconds after passing the 6000 foot level, so, if half of them die off in 1.5 microseconds, as
claimed above, we should only expect to register about 570/2 = 285 per hour with the same
detector at this level. Dropping another 1500 feet, to the 3000 foot level, we expect about 280/2
= 140 per hour, at 1500 feet about 70 per hour, and at ground level about 35 per hour. (We have
rounded off some figures a bit, but this is reasonably close to the expected value.)
To summarize: given the known rate at which these raining-down unstable muons decay, and
given that 570 per hour hit a detector near the top of Mount Washington, we only expect about
35 per hour to survive down to sea level. In fact, when the detector was brought down to sea
level, it detected about 400 per hour! How did they survive? The reason they didnt decay is
that in their frame of reference, much less time had passed. Their actual speed is about 0.994c,
corresponding to a time dilation factor of about 9, so in the 6 microsecond trip from the top of
Mount Washington to sea level, their clocks register only 6/9 = 0.67 microseconds. In this period
of time, only about one-quarter of them decay.
What does this look like from the muons point of view? How do they manage to get so far in so
little time? To them, Mount Washington and the earths surface are approaching at 0.994c, or
about 1,000 feet per microsecond. But in the 0.67 microseconds it takes them to get to sea level,
it would seem that to them sea level could only get 670 feet closer, so how could they travel the
whole 6000 feet from the top of Mount Washington? The answer is the Fitzgerald contraction.
To them, Mount Washington is squashed in a vertical direction (the direction of motion) by a
2
2
factor of 1 v / c , the same as the time dilation factor, which for the muons is about 9. So,
to the muons, Mount Washington is only 670 feet highthis is why they can get down it so fast!

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Copyright 1996, 2008 Michael Fowler

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Time Dilation: A Worked Example

Michael Fowler, UVa Physics, 12/1/07

Moving Clocks Run Slow plus Moving Clocks Lose Synchronization

plus Length Contraction leads to consistency!

The object of this exercise is to show explicitly how it is possible for two observers in inertial
frames moving relative to each other at a relativistic speed to each see the others clocks as
running slow and as being unsynchronized, and yet if they both look at the same clock at the
same time from the same place (which may be far from the clock), they will agree on what time
it shows!
Suppose that in Jacks frame we have two synchronized clocks C1 and C2 set 18 x 108 meters
apart (thats about a million miles, or 6 light-seconds). Jills spaceship, carrying a clock C', is
traveling at 0.6c, that is 1.8 x 108 meters per second, parallel to the line C1C2, passing close by
each clock.

Suppose C' is synchronized with C1 as they pass, so both read zero.

As measured by Jack the spaceship will take just 10 seconds to reach C2, since the distance is 6
light seconds, and the ship is traveling at 0.6c.
What does clock C' (the clock on the ship) read as it passes C2?
The time dilation factor

1 v2 / c2 4 / 5
so C', Jills clock, will read 8 seconds.

Thus if both Jack and Jill are at C2 as Jill and her clock C' pass C2 , both will agree that the
clocks look like:

How, then, can Jill claim that Jacks clocks C1, C2 are the ones that are running slow?
To Jill, C1, C2 are running slow, but remember they are not synchronized. To Jill, C1 is behind C2
by

Lv / c 2 L / c v / c 6 0.6 3.6 seconds.

Therefore, Jill will conclude that since C2 reads 10 seconds as she passes it, at that instant C1
must be registering 6.4 seconds. Jills own clock reads 8 seconds at that instant, so she
concludes that C1 is running slow by the appropriate time dilation factor of 4/5. This is how the
change in synchronization makes it possible for both Jack and Jill to see the others clocks as
running slow.
Of course, Jills assertion that as she passes Jacks second ground clock C2 the first ground
clock C1 must be registering 6.4 seconds is not completely trivial to check! After all, that clock
is now a million miles away!
Let us imagine, though, that both observers are equipped with Hubble-style telescopes attached
to fast acting cameras, so reading a clock a million miles away is no trick.
To settle the argument, the two of them agree that as she passes the second clock, Jack will be
stationed at the second clock, and at the instant of her passing they will both take telephoto
digital snapshots of the faraway clock C1, to see what time it reads.

Jack, of course, knows that C1 is 6 light seconds away, and is synchronized with C2 which at that
instant is reading 10 seconds, so his snapshot must show C1 to read 4 seconds. That is, looking at
C1 he sees it as it was six seconds ago.
What does Jills digital snapshot show? It must be identicaltwo snapshots taken from the
same place at the same time must show the same thing! So, Jill must also gets a picture of C1
reading 4 seconds.
How can she reconcile a picture of the clock reading 4 seconds with her assertion that at the
instant she took the photograph the clock was registering 6.4 seconds?
The answer is that she can if she knows her relativity!
First point: length contraction. To Jill, the clock C1 is actually only 4/5 x 18 x 108 meters away
(she sees the distance C1C2 to be Lorentz contracted!).
Second point: The light didnt even have to go that far! In her frame, the clock C1 is moving
away, so the light arriving when shes at C2 must have left C1 when it was closerat distance x
in the figure below. The figure shows the light in her frame moving from the clock towards her at
speed c, while at the same time the clock itself is moving to the left at 0.6c.
It might be helpful to imagine yourself in her frame of reference, so you are at rest, and to think
of clocks C1 and C2 as being at the front end and back end respectively of a train that is going
past you at speed 0.6c. Then, at the moment the back of the train passes you, you take a picture
(through your telescope, of course) of the clock at the front of the train. Obviously, the light
from the front clock that enters your camera at that instant left the front clock some time ago.
During the time that light traveled towards you at speed c, the front of the train itself was going
in the opposite direction at speed 0.6c. But you know the length of the train in your frame is 4/5
x 18 x 108 meters, so since at the instant you take the picture the back of the train is passing you,
the front of the train must be 4/5 x 18 x 108 meters away. Now that distance, 4/5 x 18 x 108, is the
sum of the distance the light entering your camera traveled plus the distance the train traveled in
the same time, that is, (1 + 0.6)/1 times the distance the light traveled.

So the image of the first ground clock she sees and records as she passes the second ground clock
must have been emitted when the first clock was a distance x from her in her frame, where

x 1 3 / 5 4 / 5 18 108 meters, so x 9 108 meters.

Having established that the clock image she is seeing as she takes the photograph left the clock
when it was only 9 x 108 meters away, that is, 3 light seconds, she concludes that she is observing
the first ground clock as it was three seconds ago.
Third point: time dilation. The story so far: she has a photograph of the first ground clock that
shows it to be reading 4 seconds. She knows that the light took three seconds to reach her. So,
what can she conclude the clock must actually be registering at the instant the photo was taken?
If you are tempted to say 7 seconds, you have forgotten that in her frame, the clock is moving at
0.6c and hence runs slow by a factor 4/5.
Including the time dilation factor correctly, she concludes that in the 3 seconds that the light from
the clock took to reach her, the clock itself will have ticked away 3 4/5 seconds, or 2.4 seconds.
Therefore, since the photograph shows the clock to read 4 seconds, and she finds the clock must
have run a further 2.4 seconds, she deduces that at the instant she took the photograph the clock
must actually have been registering 6.4 seconds, which is what she had claimed all along!
The key point of this lecture is that at first it seems impossible for two observers moving relative
to each other to both maintain that the other ones clocks run slow. However, by bringing in the
other necessary consequences of the theory of relativity, the Lorentz contraction of lengths, and
that clocks synchronized in one frame are out of synchronization in another by a precise amount

that follows necessarily from the constancy of the speed of light, the whole picture becomes
completely consistent!
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More Relativity: The Train and The Twins

Michael F owler , UVa Physics, 11/28/07

Einsteins Definition of Common Sense

As you can see from the lectures so far, although Einsteins Theory of Special Relativity solves
the problem posed by the Michelson-Morley experimentthe nonexistence of an etherit is at a
price. The simple assertion that the speed of a flash of light is always c in any inertial frame
leads to consequences that defy common sense. When this was pointed out somewhat forcefully
to Einstein, his response was that common sense is the layer of prejudices put down before the
age of eighteen. All our intuition about space, time and motion is based on childhood
observation of a world in which no objects move at speeds comparable to that of light. Perhaps
if we had been raised in a civilization zipping around the universe in spaceships moving at
relativistic speeds, Einsteins assertions about space and time would just seem to be common
sense. The real question, from a scientific point of view, is not whether Special Relativity defies
common sense, but whether it can be shown to lead to a contradiction. If that is so, common
sense wins. Ever since the theory was published, people have been writing papers claiming it
does lead to contradictions. The previous lecture, the worked example on time dilation, shows
how careful analysis of an apparent contradiction leads to the conclusion that in fact there was no
contradiction after all. In this lecture, we shall consider other apparent contradictions and think
about how to resolve them. This is the best way to build up an understanding of Relativity.

Trapping a Train in a Tunnel

One of the first paradoxes to be aired was based on the Fitzgerald contraction. Recall that any
object moving relative to an observer will be seen by that observer to be contracted,

1 v2 / c2
foreshortened in the direction of motion by the ubiquitous factor
. Einstein lived in
Switzerland, a very mountainous country where the railroads between towns often go through
tunnels deep in the mountains.

Suppose a train of length L is moving along a straight track at a relativistic speed and enters a
tunnel, also of length L. There are bandits inhabiting the mountain above the tunnel. They

L 1 v2 / c2

observe a short train, one of length

, so they wait until this short train is
completely inside the tunnel of length L, then they close doors at the two ends, and the train is
trapped fully inside the mountain. Now look at this same scenario from the point of view of

L 1 v2 / c2

someone on the train. He sees a train of length L, approaching a tunnel of length

, so the tunnel is not as long as the train from his viewpoint! What does he think happens when
the bandits close both the doors?

The Tunnel Doors are Closed Simultaneously

The key to understanding what is happening here is that we said the bandits closed the two doors
at the ends of the tunnel at the same time. How could they arrange to do that, since the doors are
far apart? They could use walkie-talkies, which transmit radio waves, or just flash a light down
the tunnel, since its long and straight. Remember, though, that the train is itself going at a speed
close to that of light, so they have to be quite precise about this timing! The simplest way to
imagine them synchronizing the closings of the two doors is to assume they know the trains
timetable, and at a prearranged appropriate time, a light is flashed halfway down the tunnel, and
the end doors are closed when the flash of light reaches the ends of the tunnel. Assuming the
light was positioned correctly in the middle of the tunnel, that should ensure that the two doors
close simultaneously.

Or are They?
Now consider this door-closing operation from the point of view of someone on the train.
Assume hes in an observation car and has incredible eyesight, and theres a little mist, so he
actually sees the light flash, and the two flashes traveling down the tunnels towards the two end
doors. Of course, the train is a perfectly good inertial frame, so he sees these two flashes to be
traveling in opposite directions, but both at c, relative to the train. Meanwhile, he sees the tunnel
itself to be moving rapidly relative to the train. Let us say the train enters the mountain through
the front door. The observer will see the door at the other end of the tunnel, the back door,
to be rushing towards him, and rushing to meet the flash of light. Meanwhile, once hes in the
tunnel, the front door is receding rapidly behind him, so the flash of light making its way to that
door has to travel further to catch it. So the two flashes of light going down the tunnel in
opposite directions do not reach the two doors simultaneously as seen from the train.
The concept of simultaneity, events happening at the same time, is not invariant as we move from
one inertial frame to another. The man on the train sees the back door close first, and, if it is not

quickly reopened, the front of the train will pile into it before the front door is closed behind the
train.

Does the Fitzgerald Contraction Work Sideways?

The above discussion is based on Einsteins prediction that objects moving at relativistic speed
appear shrunken in their direction of motion. How do we know that theyre not shrunken in all
three directions, i.e. moving objects maybe keep the same shape, but just get smaller? This can
be seen not to be the case through a symmetry argument, also due to Einstein. Suppose two
trains traveling at equal and opposite relativistic speeds, one north, one south, pass on parallel
tracks. Suppose two passengers of equal height, one on each train, are standing leaning slightly
out of open windows so that their noses should very lightly touch as they pass each other. Now,
if N (the northbound passenger) sees S as shrunken in height, Ns nose will brush against Ss
forehead, say, and N will feel Ss nose brush his chin. Afterwards, then, N will have a bruised
chin (plus nose), S a bruised forehead (plus nose). But this is a perfectly symmetric problem, so
S would say N had the bruised forehead, etc. They can both get off their trains at the next
stations and get together to check out bruises. They must certainly be symmetrical! The only
consistent symmetrical solution is given by asserting that neither sees the other to shrink in
height (i.e. in the direction perpendicular to their relative motion), so that their noses touch each
other. Therefore, the Lorentz contraction only operates in the direction of motion, objects get
squashed but not shrunken.

How to Give Twins Very Different Birthdays

Perhaps the most famous of the paradoxes of special relativity, which was still being hotly
debated in national journals in the fifties, is the twin paradox. The scenario is as follows. One of
two twinsthe sisteris an astronaut. (Flouting tradition, we will take fraternal rather than
identical twins, so that we can use he and she to make clear which twin we mean). She sets
off in a relativistic spaceship to alpha-centauri, four light-years away, at a speed of, say, 0.6c.
When she gets there, she immediately turns around and comes back. As seen by her brother on

1 v2 / c2
earth, her clocks ran slowly by the time dilation factor
, so although the round trip
took 8/0.6 years = 160 months by earth time, she has only aged by 4/5 of that, or 128 months. So
as she steps down out of the spaceship, she is 32 months younger than her twin brother.
But wait a minutehow does this look from her point of view? She sees the earth to be moving
at 0.6c, first away from her then towards her. So she must see her brothers clock on earth to be
running slow! So doesnt she expect her brother on earth to be the younger one after this trip?
The key to this paradox is that this situation is not as symmetrical as it looks. The two twins
have quite different experiences. The one on the spaceship is not in an inertial frame during the

initial acceleration and the turnaround and braking periods. (To get an idea of the speeds
involved, to get to 0.6c at the acceleration of a falling stone would take over six months.) Our
analysis of how a clock in one inertial frame looks as viewed from another doesnt work during
times when one of the frames isnt inertialin other words, when one is accelerating.

The Twins Stay in Touch

To try to see just how the difference in ages might develop, let us imagine that the twins stay in
touch with each other throughout the trip. Each twin flashes a powerful light once a month,
according to their calendars and clocks, so that by counting the flashes, each one can monitor
how fast the other one is aging.
The questions we must resolve are:
If the brother, on earth, flashes a light once a month, how frequently, as measured by her clock,
does the sister see his light to be flashing as she moves away from earth at speed 0.6c?
How frequently does she see the flashes as she is returning at 0.6c?
How frequently does the brother on earth see the flashes from the spaceship?
Once we have answered these questions, it will be a matter of simple bookkeeping to find how
much each twin has aged.

Figuring the Observed Time between Flashes

To figure out how frequently each twin observes the others flashes to be, we will use some
results from the previous lecture, on time dilation. In some ways, that was a very small scale
version of the present problem. Recall that we had two ground clocks only one million miles
apart. As the astronaut, conveniently moving at 0.6c, passed the first ground clock, both that
clock and her own clock read zero. As she passed the second ground clock, her own clock read 8
seconds and the first ground clock, which she photographed at that instant, she observed to read
4 seconds.
That is to say, after 8 seconds had elapsed on her own clock, constant observation of the first
ground clock would have revealed it to have registered only 4 seconds. (This effect is
compounded of time dilation and the fact that as she moves away, the light from the clock is
taking longer and longer to reach her.)
Our twin problem is the same thing, at the same speed, but over a longer time - we conclude that
observation of any earth clock from the receding spacecraft will reveal it to be running at half

speed, so the brothers flashes will be seen at the spacecraft to arrive every two months, by
spacecraft time.
Symmetrically, as long as the brother on earth observes his sisters spacecraft to be moving away
at 0.6c, he will see light from her flashes to be arriving at the earth every two months by earth
time.
To figure the frequency of her brothers flashes observed as she returns towards earth, we have to
go back to our previous example and find how the astronaut traveling at 0.6c observes time to be
registered by the second ground clock, the one shes approaching.
We know that as she passes that clock, it reads 10 seconds and her own clock reads 8 seconds.
We must figure out what she would have seen that second ground clock to read had she glanced
at it through a telescope as she passed the first ground clock, at which point both her own clock
and the first ground clock read zero. But at that instant, the reading she would see on the second
ground clock must be the same as would be seen by an observer on the ground, standing by the
first ground clock and observing the second ground clock through a telescope. Since the ground
observer knows both ground clocks are synchronized, and the first ground clock reads zero, and
the second is 6 light seconds distant, it must read -6 seconds if observed at that instant.
Hence the astronaut will observe the second ground clock to progress from -6 seconds to +10
seconds during the period that her own clock goes from 0 to 8 seconds. In other words, she sees
the clock she is approaching at 0.6c to be running at double speed.
Finally, back to the twins. During her journey back to earth, the sister will see the brothers light
flashing twice a month. (Evidently, the time dilation effect does not fully compensate for the fact
that each succeeding flash has less far to go to reach her.)
We are now ready to do the bookkeeping, first, from the sisters point of view.

What does she see?

At 0.6c, she sees the distance to alpha-centauri to be contracted by the familiar

1 v 2 / c 2 0.8

to a distance of 3.2 light years, which at 0.6c will take her a time 5.333 years,
or, more conveniently, 64 months. During the outward trip, then, she will see 32 flashes from
home, she will see her brother to age by 32 months.
Her return trip will also take 64 months, during which time she will see 128 flashes, so over the
whole trip she will see 128 + 32 = 160 flashes, so she will have seen her brother to age by 160
months or 13 years 4 months.

What does he see?

As he watches for flashes through his telescope, the stay-at-home brother will see his sister to be
aging at half his own rate of aging as long as he sees her to be moving away from him, then
aging at twice his rate as he sees her coming back. At first glance, this sounds the same as what
she seesbut it isnt! The important question to ask is when does he see her turn around? To
him, her outward journey of 4 light years distance at a speed of 0.6c takes her 4/0.6 years, or 80
months. BUT he doesnt see her turn around until 4 years later, because of the time light takes to
get back to earth from alpha-centauri! In other words, he will actually see her aging at half his
rate for 80 + 48 = 128 months, during which time he will see 64 flashes.
When he sees his sister turn around, she is already more than half way back! Remember, in his
frame the whole trip takes 160 months (8 light years at 0.6c) so he will only see her aging at
twice his rate during the last 160 - 128 = 32 months, during which period he will see all 64
flashes she sent out on her return trip.
Therefore, by counting the flashes of light she transmitted once a month, he will conclude she
has aged 128 months on the trip, which by his clock and calendar took 160 months. So when she
steps off the spacecraft 32 months younger than her twin brother, neither of them will be
surprised!

The Doppler Effect

The above analysis hinges on the fact that a traveler approaching a flashing light at 0.6c will see
it flashing at double its natural ratethe rate observed by someone standing still with the light
and a traveler receding at 0.6c from a flashing light will see it to flash at only half its natural
rate.
This is a particular example of the Doppler Effect, first discussed in 1842 by the German
physicist Christian Doppler. There is a Doppler Effect for sound waves too. Sound is generated
by a vibrating object sending a succession of pressure pulses through the air. These pressure
waves are analogous to the flashes of light. If you are approaching a sound source you will
encounter the pressure waves more frequently than if you stand still. This means you will hear a
higher frequency sound. If the distance between you and the source of sound is increasing, you
will hear a lower frequency. This is why the note of a jet plane or a siren goes lower as it passes
you. The details of the Doppler Effect for sound are a little different than those for light, because
the speed of sound is not the same for all observersits 330 meters per second relative to the
air.

An important astronomical application of the Doppler Effect is the red shift. The light from very
distant galaxies is redder than the light from similar galaxies nearer to us. This is because the
further away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us, as the Universe expands. The
light is redder because red light is low frequency light (blue is high) and we see low frequency
light for the same reason that the astronaut receding from earth sees flashes less frequently. In
fact, the farthest away galaxies we can see are receding faster than the 0.6c of our astronaut!
In the next lecture, we shall brush up on the pre-relativistic concepts of momentum, work and
energy to be ready for their relativistic generalizations.
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Momentum, Work and Energy

Michael Fowler, U. Va. Physics, 11/29/07
Momentum

At this point, we introduce some further concepts that will prove useful in describing motion.
The first of these, momentum, was actually introduced by the French scientist and philosopher
Descartes before Newton. Descartes idea is best understood by considering a simple example:
think first about someone (weighing say 45 kg) standing motionless on high quality (frictionless)
rollerskates on a level smooth floor. A 5 kg medicine ball is thrown directly at her by someone
standing in front of her, and only a short distance away, so that we can take the balls flight to be
close to horizontal. She catches and holds it, and because of its impact begins to roll backwards.
Notice weve chosen her weight so that, conveniently, she plus the ball weigh just ten times what
the ball weighs by itself. What is found on doing this experiment carefully is that after the catch,
she plus the ball roll backwards at just one-tenth the speed the ball was moving just before she
caught it, so if the ball was thrown at 5 meters per second, she will roll backwards at one-half
meter per second after the catch. It is tempting to conclude that the total amount of motion is
the same before and after her catching the ball, since we end up with ten times the mass moving
at one-tenth the speed.
Considerations and experiments like this led Descartes to invent the concept of momentum,
meaning amount of motion, and to state that for a moving body the momentum was just the
product of the mass of the body and its speed. Momentum is traditionally labeled by the letter p,
so his definition was:
momentum = p = mv

for a body having mass m and moving at speed v. It is then obvious that in the above scenario of
the woman catching the medicine ball, total momentum is the same before and after the catch.
Initially, only the ball had momentum, an amount 5x5 = 25 in suitable units, since its mass is 5kg
and its speed is 5 meters per second. After the catch, there is a total mass of 50kg moving at a
speed of 0.5 meters per second, so the final momentum is 0.5x50 = 25, the total final amount is
equal to the total initial amount. We have just invented these figures, of course, but they reflect
what is observed experimentally.
There is however a problem hereobviously one can imagine collisions in which the total
amount of motion, as defined above, is definitely not the same before and after. What about
two people on rollerskates, of equal weight, coming directly towards each other at equal but
opposite velocitiesand when they meet they put their hands together and come to a complete
halt? Clearly in this situation there was plenty of motion before the collision and none
afterwards, so the total amount of motion definitely doesnt stay the same! In physics
language, it is not conserved. Descartes was hung up on this problem a long time, but was
rescued by a Dutchman, Christian Huygens, who pointed out that the problem could be solved in
a consistent fashion if one did not insist that the quantity of motion be positive.
In other words, if something moving to the right was taken to have positive momentum, then one
should consider something moving to the left to have negative momentum. With this convention,
two people of equal mass coming together from opposite directions at the same speed would
have total momentum zero, so if they came to a complete halt after meeting, as described above,
the total momentum before the collision would be the same as the total afterthat is, zeroand
momentum would be conserved.
Of course, in the discussion above we are restricting ourselves to motions along a single line. It
should be apparent that to get a definition of momentum that is conserved in collisions what
Huygens really did was to tell Descartes he should replace speed by velocity in his definition of
momentum. It is a natural extension of this notion to think of momentum as defined by
momentum = mass x velocity

in general, so, since velocity is a vector, momentum is also a vector, pointing in the same
direction as the velocity, of course.
It turns out experimentally that in any collision between two objects (where no interaction with
third objects, such as surfaces, interferes), the total momentum before the collision is the same as
the total momentum after the collision. It doesnt matter if the two objects stick together on
colliding or bounce off, or what kind of forces they exert on each other, so conservation of
momentum is a very general rule, quite independent of details of the collision.

Momentum Conservation and Newtons Laws

As we have discussed above, Descartes introduced the concept of momentum, and the general
principle of conservation of momentum in collisions, before Newtons time. However, it turns
out that conservation of momentum can be deduced from Newtons laws. Newtons laws in
principle fully describe all collision-type phenomena, and therefore must contain momentum
conservation.
To understand how this comes about, consider first Newtons Second Law relating the
acceleration a of a body of mass m with an external force F acting on it:
F = ma, or force = mass x acceleration

Recall that acceleration is rate of change of velocity, so we can rewrite the Second Law:
force = mass x rate of change of velocity.

Now, the momentum is mv, mass x velocity. This means for an object having constant mass
(which is almost always the case, of course!)
rate of change of momentum = mass x rate of change of velocity.

This means that Newtons Second Law can be rewritten:

force = rate of change of momentum.

Now think of a collision, or any kind of interaction, between two objects A and B, say. From
Newtons Third Law, the force A feels from B is of equal magnitude to the force B feels from A,
but in the opposite direction. Since (as we have just shown) force = rate of change of
momentum, it follows that throughout the interaction process the rate of change of momentum of
A is exactly opposite to the rate of change of momentum of B. In other words, since these are
vectors, they are of equal length but pointing in opposite directions. This means that for every
bit of momentum A gains, B gains the negative of that. In other words, B loses momentum at
exactly the rate A gains momentum so their total momentum remains the same. But this is true
throughout the interaction process, from beginning to end. Therefore, the total momentum at the
end must be what it was at the beginning.
You may be thinking at this point: so what? We already know that Newtons laws are obeyed
throughout, so why dwell on one special consequence of them? The answer is that although we
know Newtons laws are obeyed, this may not be much use to us in an actual case of two
complicated objects colliding, because we may not be able to figure out what the forces are.
Nevertheless, we do know that momentum will be conserved anyway, so if, for example, the two

objects stick together, and no bits fly off, we can find their final velocity just from momentum
conservation, without knowing any details of the collision.
Work

The word work as used in physics has a narrower meaning than it does in everyday life. First,
it only refers to physical work, of course, and second, something has to be accomplished. If you
lift up a box of books from the floor and put it on a shelf, youve done work, as defined in
physics, if the box is too heavy and you tug at it until youre worn out but it doesnt move, that
doesnt count as work.
Technically, work is done when a force pushes something and the object moves some distance in
the direction its being pushed (pulled is ok, too). Consider lifting the box of books to a high
shelf. If you lift the box at a steady speed, the force you are exerting is just balancing off gravity,
the weight of the box, otherwise the box would be accelerating. (Of course, initially youd have
to exert a little bit more force to get it going, and then at the end a little less, as the box comes to
rest at the height of the shelf.) Its obvious that you will have to do twice as much work to raise
a box of twice the weight, so the work done is proportional to the force you exert. Its also clear
that the work done depends on how high the shelf is. Putting these together, the definition of
work is:
work = force x distance

where only distance traveled in the direction the force is pushing counts. With this definition,
carrying the box of books across the room from one shelf to another of equal height doesnt
count as work, because even though your arms have to exert a force upwards to keep the box
from falling to the floor, you do not move the box in the direction of that force, that is, upwards.
To get a more quantitative idea of how much work is being done, we need to have some units to
measure work. Defining work as force x distance, as usual we will measure distance in meters,
but we havent so far talked about units for force. The simplest way to think of a unit of force is
in terms of Newtons Second Law, force = mass x acceleration. The natural unit force would
be that force which, pushing a unit mass (one kilogram) with no friction of other forces present,
accelerates the mass at one meter per second per second, so after two seconds the mass is moving
at two meters per second, etc. This unit of force is called one newton (as we discussed in an
earlier lecture). Note that a one kilogram mass, when dropped, accelerates downwards at ten
meters per second per second. This means that its weight, its gravitational attraction towards the
earth, must be equal to ten newtons. From this we can figure out that a one newton force equals
the weight of 100 grams, just less than a quarter of a pound, a stick of butter.
The downward acceleration of a freely falling object, ten meters per second per second, is often
written g for short. (To be precise, g = 9.8 meters per second per second, and in fact varies

somewhat over the earths surface, but this adds complication without illumination, so we shall
always take it to be 10.) If we have a mass of m kilograms, say, we know its weight will
accelerate it at g if its dropped, so its weight is a force of magnitude mg, from Newtons Second
Law.
Now back to work. Since work is force x distance, the natural unit of work would be the work
done be a force of one newton pushing a distance of one meter. In other words (approximately)
lifting a stick of butter three feet. This unit of work is called one joule, in honor of an English
brewer.
Finally, it is useful to have a unit for rate of working, also called power. The natural unit of
rate of working is manifestly one joule per second, and this is called one watt. To get some
feeling for rate of work, consider walking upstairs. A typical step is eight inches, or one-fifth of
a meter, so you will gain altitude at, say, two-fifths of a meter per second. Your weight is, say
(put in your own weight here!) 70 kg. (for me) multiplied by 10 to get it in newtons, so its 700
newtons. The rate of working then is 700 x 2/5, or 280 watts. Most people cant work at that
rate for very long. A common English unit of power is the horsepower, which is 746 watts.

Energy

Energy is the ability to do work.

For example, it takes work to drive a nail into a piece of wooda force has to push the nail a
certain distance, against the resistance of the wood. A moving hammer, hitting the nail, can drive
it in. A stationary hammer placed on the nail does nothing. The moving hammer has energy
the ability to drive the nail inbecause its moving. This hammer energy is called kinetic
energy. Kinetic is just the Greek word for motion, its the root word for cinema, meaning
movies.
Another way to drive the nail in, if you have a good aim, might be to simply drop the hammer
onto the nail from some suitable height. By the time the hammer reaches the nail, it will have
kinetic energy. It has this energy, of course, because the force of gravity (its weight) accelerated
it as it came down. But this energy didnt come from nowhere. Work had to be done in the first
place to lift the hammer to the height from which it was dropped onto the nail. In fact, the work
done in the initial lifting, force x distance, is just the weight of the hammer multiplied by the
distance it is raised, in joules. But this is exactly the same amount of work as gravity does on the
hammer in speeding it up during its fall onto the nail. Therefore, while the hammer is at the top,
waiting to be dropped, it can be thought of as storing the work that was done in lifting it, which
is ready to be released at any time. This stored work is called potential energy, since it has the
potential of being transformed into kinetic energy just by releasing the hammer.

To give an example, suppose we have a hammer of mass 2 kg, and we lift it up through 5 meters.
The hammers weight, the force of gravity, is 20 newtons (recall it would accelerate at 10 meters
per second per second under gravity, like anything else) so the work done in lifting it is force x
distance = 20 x 5 = 100 joules, since lifting it at a steady speed requires a lifting force that just
balances the weight. This 100 joules is now stored ready for use, that is, it is potential energy.
Upon releasing the hammer, the potential energy becomes kinetic energythe force of gravity
pulls the hammer downwards through the same distance the hammer was originally raised
upwards, so since its a force of the same size as the original lifting force, the work done on the
hammer by gravity in giving it motion is the same as the work done previously in lifting it, so as
it hits the nail it has a kinetic energy of 100 joules. We say that the potential energy is
transformed into kinetic energy, which is then spent driving in the nail.
We should emphasize that both energy and work are measured in the same units, joules. In the
example above, doing work by lifting just adds energy to a body, so-called potential energy,
equal to the amount of work done.
From the above discussion, a mass of m kilograms has a weight of mg newtons. It follows that
the work needed to raise it through a height h meters is force x distance, that is, weight x height,
or mgh joules. This is the potential energy.
Historically, this was the way energy was stored to drive clocks. Large weights were raised once
a week and as they gradually fell, the released energy turned the wheels and, by a sequence of
ingenious devices, kept the pendulum swinging. The problem was that this necessitated rather
large clocks to get a sufficient vertical drop to store enough energy, so spring-driven clocks
became more popular when they were developed. A compressed spring is just another way of
storing energy. It takes work to compress a spring, but (apart from small frictional effects) all
that work is released as the spring uncoils or springs back. The stored energy in the compressed
spring is often called elastic potential energy, as opposed to the gravitational potential energy of
the raised weight.
Kinetic Energy

Weve given above an explicit way to find the potential energy increase of a mass m when its
lifted through a height h, its just the work done by the force that raised it, force x distance =
weight x height = mgh.
Kinetic energy is created when a force does work accelerating a mass and increases its speed.
Just as for potential energy, we can find the kinetic energy created by figuring out how much
work the force does in speeding up the body.
Remember that a force only does work if the body the force is acting on moves in the direction
of the force. For example, for a satellite going in a circular orbit around the earth, the force of

gravity is constantly accelerating the body downwards, but it never gets any closer to sea level, it
just swings around. Thus the body does not actually move any distance in the direction gravitys
pulling it, and in this case gravity does no work on the body.
Consider, in contrast, the work the force of gravity does on a stone that is simply dropped from a
cliff. Lets be specific and suppose its a one kilogram stone, so the force of gravity is ten
newtons downwards. In one second, the stone will be moving at ten meters per second, and will
have dropped five meters. The work done at this point by gravity is force x distance = 10
newtons x 5 meters = 50 joules, so this is the kinetic energy of a one kilogram mass going at 10
meters per second. How does the kinetic energy increase with speed? Think about the situation
after 2 seconds. The mass has now increased in speed to twenty meters per second. It has fallen
a total distance of twenty meters (average speed 10 meters per second x time elapsed of 2
seconds). So the work done by the force of gravity in accelerating the mass over the first two
seconds is force x distance = 10 newtons x 20 meters = 200 joules.
So we find that the kinetic energy of a one kilogram mass moving at 10 meters per second is 50
joules, moving at 20 meters per second its 200 joules. Its not difficult to check that after three
seconds, when the mass is moving at 30 meters per second, the kinetic energy is 450 joules. The
essential point is that the speed increases linearly with time, but the work done by the constant
gravitational force depends on how far the stone has dropped, and that goes as the square of the
time. Therefore, the kinetic energy of the falling stone depends on the square of the time, and
thats the same as depending on the square of the velocity. For stones of different masses, the
kinetic energy at the same speed will be proportional to the mass (since weight is proportional to
mass, and the work done by gravity is proportional to the weight), so using the figures we
worked out above for a one kilogram mass, we can conclude that for a mass of m kilograms
moving at a speed v the kinetic energy must be:
kinetic energy = mv

Exercises for the reader: both momentum and kinetic energy are in some sense measures of the
amount of motion of a body. How do they differ?
Can a body change in momentum without changing in kinetic energy?
Can a body change in kinetic energy without changing in momentum?
Suppose two lumps of clay of equal mass traveling in opposite directions at the same speed
collide head-on and stick to each other. Is momentum conserved? Is kinetic energy conserved?
As a stone drops off a cliff, both its potential energy and its kinetic energy continuously change.
How are these changes related to each other?

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Adding Velocities: A Walk on the Train

Michael Fowler, UVa Physics, 12/1/07

The Formula

If I walk from the back to the front of a train at 3 m.p.h., and the train is traveling at 60 m.p.h.,
then common sense tells me that my speed relative to the ground is 63 m.p.h. As we have seen,
this obvious truth, the simple addition of velocities, follows from the Galilean transformations.
Unfortunately, it cant be quite right for high speeds! We know that for a flash of light going
from the back of the train to the front, the speed of the light relative to the ground is exactly the
same as its speed relative to the train, not 60 m.p.h. different. Hence it is necessary to do a
careful analysis of a fairly speedy person moving from the back of the train to the front as
viewed from the ground, to see how velocities really add.
We consider our standard train of length L moving down the track at steady speed v, and
equipped with synchronized clocks at the back and the front. The walker sets off from the
back of the train when that clock reads zero. Assuming a steady walking speed of u meters
per second (relative to the train, of course), the walker will see the front clock to read L/u
seconds on arrival there.
How does this look from the ground? Lets assume that at the instant the walker began to walk
from the clock at the back of the train, the back of the train was passing the ground observers
clock, and both these clocks (one on the train and one on the ground) read zero. The ground
observer sees the walker reach the clock at the front of the train at the instant that clock reads L/u
(this is in agreement with what is observed on the traintwo simultaneous events at the same
place are simultaneous to all observers), but at this same instant, the ground observer says the
trains back clock, where the walker began, reads L/u + Lv/c2. (This follows from our previously
established result that two clocks synchronized in one frame, in which they are L apart, will be
out of synchronization in a frame in which they are moving at v along the line joining them by a
time Lv/c2.)
Now, how much time elapses as measured by the ground observers clock during the walk? At
the instant the walk began, the ground observer saw the clock at the back of the train (which was
right next to him) to read zero. At the instant the walk ended, the ground observer would say that

clock read L/u + Lv/c2, from the paragraph above. But the ground observer would see that clock
to be running slow, by the usual time dilation factor: so he would measure the time of the walk
on his own clock to be:
L / u Lv / c 2
1 v2 / c2

How far does the walker move as viewed from the ground? In the time tW, the train travels a
distance vtW, so the walker moves this distance plus the length of the train. Remember that the
train is contracted as viewed from the ground! It follows that the distance covered relative to the
ground during the walk is:
dW vtW L 1 v 2 / c 2
v

L / u Lv / c 2
1 v2 / c2

L 1 v2 / c2

vL / u Lv 2 / c 2 L L v 2 / c 2
1 v2 / c2

L 1 v / u

1 v2 / c2

The walkers speed relative to the ground is simply dW/tW, easily found from the above
expressions:
dW
1 v / u
uv

.
2
tW 1/ u v / c 1 uv / c 2
This is the appropriate formula for adding velocities. Note that it gives the correct answer, u + v,
in the low velocity limit, and also if u or v equals c, the sum of the velocities is c.
Exercise: Suppose a spaceship is equipped with a series of one-shot rockets, each of which can
accelerate the ship to c/2 from rest. It uses one rocket to leave the solar system (ignore gravity
here) and is then traveling at c/2 (relative to us) in deep space. It now fires its second rocket,
keeping the same direction. Find how fast it is moving relative to us. It now fires the third
rocket, keeping the same direction. Find its new speed. Can you draw any general conclusions
from your results?

Testing the Addition of Velocities Formula

Actually, the first test of the addition of velocities formula was carried out in the 1850s! Two
French physicists, Fizeau and Foucault, measured the speed of light in water, and found it to be
c/n, where n is the refractive index of water, about 1.33. (This was the result predicted by the
wave theory of light.)
They then measured the speed of light (relative to the ground) in moving water, by sending light
down a long pipe with water flowing through it at speed v. They discovered that the speed
relative to the ground was not just v + c/n, but had an extra term, v + c/n - v/n2. Their (incorrect)
explanation was that the light was a complicated combination of waves in the water and waves in
the aether, and the moving water was only partially dragging the aether along with it, so the light
didnt get the full speed v of the water added to its original speed c/n.
The true explanation of the extra term is much simpler: velocities dont simply add. To add the
velocity v to the velocity c/n, we must use the addition of velocities formula above, which gives
the light velocity relative to the ground to be:
(v + c/n)/(1 + v/nc)

Now, v is much smaller than c or c/n, so 1/(1 + v/nc) can be written as (1 - v/nc), giving:
(v + c/n)(1 - v/nc)

Multiplying this out gives v + c/n - v/n2 -v/nv/c, and the last term is smaller than v by a factor
v/c, so is clearly negligible.
Therefore, the 1850 experiment looking for aether drag in fact confirms the relativistic
addition of velocities formula! Of course, there are many other confirmations. For example, any
velocity added to c still gives c. Also, it indicates that the speed of light is a speed limit for all
objects, a topic we shall examine more carefully in the next lecture.
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Michael Fowler, UVa Physics, 12/1/07

Momentum has Direction

As we discussed in the last lecture, even before Newton formulated his laws, Descartes, with a
little help from Huygens, had discovered a deep dynamical truth: in any collision, or in fact in
any interaction of any kind, the total amount of momentuma measure of motionalways
stayed the same. The momentum of a moving object is defined as the product of the mass and the
velocity, and so is a vector: it has magnitude and direction. If youre standing on frictionless
skates and you throw a ball, you move backwards: you have momentum equal in magnitude, but
opposite in direction, to that of the ball, so the total momentum (yours plus the balls) remains
zero. Rockets work the same way, by throwing material out at high speed. They do not work by
pushing against the air, they work by pushing against the stuff theyre pushing out, just as you
push against a ball youre throwing, and it pushes you back, causing your acceleration.
If you still suspect that really rockets push against the air, remember they work just as well in
space! In fact, it was widely believed when Goddard, an early American rocketeer (the Goddard
Space Flight Center is named after him) talked about rockets in space, he was wasting his time.
To quote from a New York Times editorial written in 1921: Professor Goddard does not know
the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum
against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in our high
schools. Obviously, the New York Times editorial writers of the time lacked the basic
knowledge being ladled out in this course!
In fact, as we discussed, the conservation of momentum in a collision follows from Newtons
laws. However, it is a more general, simpler, conceptit doesnt depend at all on details of the
interactions, etc. This simplicity evidently appealed to Einstein, who was convinced that when
dynamics was reformulated to include the new ideas about time and space, conservation of
momentum should still hold true in any inertial frame. This led him to some surprising
conclusions, as we shall see.
Momentum Conservation on the Pool Table

As a warm-up exercise, let us consider conservation of momentum for a collision of two balls on
a pool table. We draw a chalk line down the middle of the pool table, and shoot the balls close
to, but on opposite sides of, the chalk line from either end, at the same speed, so they will hit in
the middle with a glancing blow, which will turn their velocities through a small angle. In other
words, if initially we say their (equal magnitude, opposite direction) velocities were parallel to

the x-directionthe chalk linethen after the collision they will also have equal and opposite
small velocities in the y-direction. (The x-direction velocities will have decreased very slightly).

A Symmetrical Spaceship Collision

Now let us repeat the exercise on a grand scale. Suppose somewhere in space, far from any
gravitational fields, we set out a string one million miles long. (It could be between our two
clocks in the time dilation experiment). This string corresponds to the chalk line on the pool
table. Suppose now we have two identical spaceships approaching each other with equal and
opposite velocities parallel to the string from the two ends of the string, aimed so that they suffer
a slight glancing collision when they meet in the middle. It is evident from the symmetry of the
situation that momentum is conserved in both directions. In particular, the rate at which one
spaceship moves away from the string after the collisionits y-velocityis equal and opposite
to the rate at which the other one moves away from the string.
But now consider this collision as observed by someone in one of the spaceships, call it A.
Before the collision, he sees the string moving very fast by the window, say a few meters away.
After the collision, he sees the string to be moving away, at, say, 15 meters per second. This is
because spaceship A has picked up a velocity perpendicular to the string of 15 meters per second.

Meanwhile, since this is a completely symmetrical situation, an observer on spaceship B would

certainly deduce that her spaceship was moving away from the string at 15 meters per second as
well.
Just How Symmetrical Is It?

The crucial question is: how fast does an observer in spaceship A see spaceship B to be moving
away from the string? Let us suppose that relative to spaceship A, spaceship B is moving away
(in the x-direction) at 0.6c. First, recall that distances perpendicular to the direction of motion
are not Lorentz contracted. Therefore, when the observer in spaceship B says she has moved 15
meters further away from the string in a one second interval, the observer watching this
movement from spaceship A will agree on the 15 metersbut disagree on the one second! He
will say her clocks run slow, so as measured by his clocks 1.25 seconds will have elapsed as she
moves 15 meters in the y-direction.
It follows that, as a result of time dilation, this collision as viewed from spaceship A does not
cause equal and opposite velocities for the two spaceships in the y-direction. Initially, both
spaceships were moving parallel to the x-axis, there was zero momentum in the y-direction. So
how can we argue there is zero total momentum in the y-direction after the collision, when the
identical spaceships do not have equal and opposite velocities?
Einstein Rescues Momentum Conservation

Einstein was so sure that momentum conservation must always hold that he rescued it with a
bold hypothesis: the mass of an object must depend on its speed! In fact, the mass must increase
with speed in just such a way as to cancel out the lower y-direction velocity resulting from time
dilation. That is to say, if an object at rest has a mass M, moving at a speed v it will have a mass

M / 1 v2 / c2

. Note that this is an undetectably small effect at ordinary speeds, but as an

object approaches the speed of light, the mass increases without limit!
Mass Really Does Increase with Speed

Deciding that masses of objects must depend on speed like this seems a heavy price to pay to
rescue conservation of momentum! However, it is a prediction that is not difficult to check by
experiment. The first confirmation came in 1908, measuring the mass of fast electrons in a
vacuum tube. In fact, the electrons in an old style color TV tube are about half a percent heavier
than electrons at rest, and this must be allowed for in calculating the magnetic fields used to
guide them to the screen.
Much more dramatically, in modern particle accelerators very powerful electric fields are used to
accelerate electrons, protons and other particles. It is found in practice that these particles
become heavier and heavier as the speed of light is approached, and hence need greater and
greater forces for further acceleration. Consequently, the speed of light is a natural absolute

speed limit. Particles are accelerated to speeds where their mass is thousands of times greater
than their mass measured at rest, usually called the rest mass.
Kinetic Energy and Mass for Very Fast Particles

Lets think about the kinetic energy of one of these particles traveling close to the speed of light.
Recall that in an earlier lecture we found the kinetic energy of an ordinary non-relativistic (i.e.
slow moving) mass m was mv. The way we did that was by considering how much work we
had to do to raise it through a certain height: we had to exert a force equal to its weight W to lift
it through height h, the total work done, or energy expended, being force x distance, Wh. As it
fell back down, the force of gravity, W, did an exactly equal amount of work Wh on the falling
object, but this time the work went into accelerating the object, to give it kinetic energy. Since
we know how fast falling objects pick up speed, we were able to conclude that the kinetic energy
was mv. (For details, see the previous lecture.)
More generally, we could have accelerated the mass with any constant force F, and found the
work done by the force (force x distance) to get it to speed v from a standing start. The kinetic
energy of the mass, E = mv, is exactly equal to the work done by the force in bringing the
mass up to that speed. (It can be shown in a similar way that if a force is applied to a particle
already moving at speed u, say, and it is accelerated to speed v, the work necessary is mv mu.)
It is interesting to try to repeat the exercise for a particle moving very close to the speed of light,
like the particles in the accelerators mentioned in the previous paragraph. Newtons Second
Law, in the form
Force = rate of change of momentum

is still true, but close to the speed of light the speed changes negligibly as the force continues to
workinstead, the mass increases! Therefore, we can write to an excellent approximation,
Force = (rate of change of mass) x c

where as usual c is the speed of light. To get more specific, suppose we have a constant force F
pushing a particle. At some instant, the particle has mass M, and speed extremely close to c.
One second later, since the force is continuing to work on the particle, and thus increase its
momentum from Newtons Second Law, the particle will have mass M m say, where m is the
increase in mass as a result of the work done by the force.
What is the increase in the kinetic energy E of the particle during that one second period? By
exact analogy with the non-relativistic case reviewed above, it is just the work done by the force

during that period. Now, since the mass of the particle changes by m in one second, m is also the
rate of change of mass. Therefore, from Newtons Second Law in the form
Force = (rate of change of mass) x c,

we can write
Force = mc.

The increase in kinetic energy E over the one second period is just the work done by the force,
force x distance.

Since the particle is moving essentially at the speed of light, the distance the force acts over in
the one-second period is just c meters, c = 3108.
So the total work the force does in that second is force x distance = mcc = mc.
Hence the relationship between the increase in mass of the relativistic particle and its increase in
kinetic energy is:
E = mc

Kinetic Energy and Mass for Slow Particles

Recall that to get Newtons Laws to be true in all inertial frames, we had to assume an increase

1/ 1 v 2 / c 2 .

of mass with speed by the factor

has a tiny increase in mass when it moves!

This implies that even a slow-moving object

How does that tiny increase relate to the kinetic energy? Consider a mass M, moving at speed v,
much less than the speed of light. Its kinetic energy E =Mv, as discussed above. Its mass is

M / 1 v2 / c2

, which we can write as M + m. What is m?

Since were talking about speeds we are familiar with, like a jet plane, where v/c is really small,
we can use some simple mathematical tricks to make things easier.
The first one is a good approximation for the square root of 1 x when x is a lot less than one:

1 x 1 12 x for x = 1.

1
x 100

You can easily check this with your calculator: try

1
1 12 100
0.995
extremely close to
.

99
100

, you find

0.994987...

which is

The next approximation is

1
1 x for x = 1.
1 x

This is also easy to check: again take

1
x 100

1
1 100
99
1.01010K
1 x 100 99
and
101
1 x 100
1.01.

1 v2 / c2
1 12 v 2 / c 2
Using these approximations with x v / c, we can approximate
as
,
and then

1/ 1 12 v 2 / c 2

as

1 12 v 2 / c 2

This means the total mass at speed v

M
1 v / c
2

M 1 12 v 2 / c 2

and writing this as M + m, we see the mass increase m equals Mv/c.

2
This means thatagainthe mass increase m is related to the kinetic energy E by E mc .

In fact, it is not difficult to show, using a little calculus, that over the whole range of speed from
zero to as close as you like to the speed of light, a moving particle experiences a mass increase
related to its kinetic energy by E = mc. To understand why this isnt noticed in everyday life, try
an example, such as a jet airplane weighing 100 tons moving at 2,000mph. 100 tons is 100,000
kilograms, 2,000mph is about 1,000 meters per second. Thats a kinetic energy Mv of

1011joules, but the corresponding mass change of the airplane down by the factor c, 91016,
giving an actual mass increase of about half a milligram, not too easy to detect!
E = mc

We have seen above that when a force does work accelerating a body to give it kinetic energy,
the mass of the body increases by an amount equal to the total work done by the force, the
energy E transferred, divided by c. What about when a force does work on a body that is not
speeding it up, so there is no increase in kinetic energy? For example, what if I just lift
something at a steady rate, giving it potential energy? It turns out that in this case, too, there is a
mass increase given by E = mc, of course unmeasurably small for everyday objects.
However, this is a measurable and important effect in nuclear physics. For example, the helium
atom has a nucleus which has two protons and two neutrons bound together very tightly by a
strong nuclear attraction force. If sufficient outside force is applied, this can be separated into
two heavy hydrogen nuclei, each of which has one proton and one neutron. A lot of outside
energy has to be spent to achieve this separation, and it is found that the total mass of the two
heavy hydrogen nuclei is measurably (about half a percent) heavier than the original helium
nucleus. This extra mass, multiplied by c, is just equal to the energy needed to split the helium
nucleus into two. Even more important, this energy can be recovered by letting the two heavy
hydrogen nuclei collide and join to form a helium nucleus again. (They are both electrically
charged positive, so they repel each other, and must come together fairly fast to overcome this
repulsion and get to the closeness where the much stronger nuclear attraction kicks in.) This is
the basic power source of the hydrogen bomb, and of the sun.
It turns out that all forms of energy, kinetic and different kinds of potential energy, have
associated mass given by E = mc. For nuclear reactions, the mass change is typically of order
one thousandth of the total mass, and readily measurable. For chemical reactions, the change is
of order a billionth of the total mass, and not currently measurable.
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Copyright Michael Fowler, 1996, 2007

Special Relativity: Synchronizing Clocks

Michael Fowler, UVa Physics 2/29/08
Suppose we want to synchronize two clocks that are some distance apart.

We could stand beside one of them and look at the other through a telescope, but wed have to
remember in that case that we are seeing the clock as it was when the light left it, and correct
accordingly.
Another way to be sure the clocks are synchronized, assuming they are both accurate, is to start
them together. How can we do that? We could, for example, attach a photocell to each clock, so
when a flash of light reaches the clock, it begins running.

If, then, we place a flashbulb at the midpoint of the line joining the two clocks, and flash it, the
light flash will take the same time to reach the two clocks, so they will start at the same time, and
therefore be synchronized.
Let us now put this whole arrangementthe two clocks and the midpoint flashbulbon a train,
and we suppose the train is moving at some speed v to the right, say half the speed of light or so.
Lets look carefully at the clock-synchronizing operation as seen from the ground. In fact, an
observer on the ground would say the clocks are not synchronized by this operation! The basic
reason is that he would see the flash of light from the middle of the train traveling at c relative to
the ground in each direction, but he would also observe the back of the train coming at v to meet
the flash, whereas the front is moving at v away from the bulb, so the light flash must go further
to catch up.

In fact, it is not difficult to figure out how much later the flash reaches the front of the train
compared with the back of the train, as viewed from the ground. First recall that as viewed from
2
2
the ground the train has length L 1 v / c .

Letting tB be the time it takes the flash to reach the back of the train, it is clear from the figure
that

vt B ct B

L
v2
1 2
2
c

from which tB is given by

tB

1 L
v2
1 2 .
cv 2
c

In a similar way, the time for the flash of light to reach the front of the train is (as measured by a
ground observer)
tF

1 L
v2
1 2 .
cv 2
c

Therefore the time difference between the starting of the two clocks, as seen from the ground, is

1
1 L
2

1 v / c

c v c v 2
2
2v L
2 2
1 v / c
c v 2
2v
1
L
2
2
1 v / c
2
c 1 v / c 2

tF tB

vL
1
.
2
c 1 v / c 2

Remember, this is the time difference between the starting of the trains back clock and its front
clock as measured by an observer on the ground with clocks on the ground. However, to this

1 v / c

observer the clocks on the train appear to tick more slowly, by the factor
, so that
although the ground observer measures the time interval between the starting of the clock at the

vL / c 1/
2

back of the train and the clock at the front as

1 v / c

seconds, he also sees the

2
slow running clock at the back actually reading vL / c seconds at the instant he sees the front
clock to start.

To summarize: as seen from the ground, the two clocks on the train (which is moving at v in the

1 v / c

x-direction) are running slowly, registering only

seconds for each second that
passes. Equally important, the clockswhich are synchronized by an observer on the train
appear unsynchronized when viewed from the ground, the one at the back of the train reading
vL / c 2 seconds ahead of the clock at the front of the train, where L is the rest length of the train
(the length as measured by an observer on the train).
Note that if L = 0, that is, if the clocks are together, both the observers on the train and those on
the ground will agree that they are synchronized. We need a distance between the clocks, as well
as relative motion, to get a disagreement about synchronization.
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Counting in Babylon
Michael Fowler, UVa Physics, 9/2/08
The Earliest Written Language
Sumer and Babylonia, located in present-day Iraq, were probably the first peoples to
have a written language, beginning in Sumer in about 3100 BC. The language
continued to be written until the time of Christ, but then it was completely
forgotten, even the name Sumer became unknown until the nineteenth century.

From the earliest times, the language was used for business and administrative
documents. Later, it was used for writing down epics, myths, etc., which had earlier
probably been handed down by oral tradition, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Weights and Measures: 60s everywhere!
In about 2500 BC, by Royal Edict, weights and measures were standardized in
Babylon. This was a practical business decision, which without doubt eliminated
much tension in the marketplace.
The smallest unit of weight was the grain (about 45 milligrams). What use was
that? At first, the currency was in fact barleycorn! (They later moved to silver and
gold ingots.) The shekel was 180 grains (about ounce), the mina 60 shekels, and
the talent 3600 shekels (about 67 pounds). More details here.

1 talent =

60 minas =
1 mina

3600 shekels =

approx 60 lbs

60 shekels =
1 shekel =

approx 1 lb
180 grains =
1 grain =

approx oz
approx 45 mg

The smallest unit of length wassurprisethe barleycorn, called she, about 1/10
inch.

Next came the finger, or shu-si, equal to 6 she, about 2/3 of an inch.
The cubit (or kush) was 30 fingers, about 20 inches.
The nindan (or GAR, or rod) was 12 cubits, 20 feet or 6 meters.
The cord or rope (used in surveying) was 120 cubits, 200 feet, that is, 3600
fingers.
The league (also called stage and beru) was 180 cords, about seven miles.

The basic unit of area was the sar, one square nindan, 400 sq ft, a garden plot.
The gin was 1/60 sar.

By 2000 BC, there was a calendar with a year of 360 days, 12 months of 30 days
each, with an extra month thrown in every six years or so to keep synchronized with
astronomical observations. (According to Dampier, A History of Science,
Cambridge, page 3, the day was divided into hours, minutes and seconds, and the
sundial invented. He implies this is about 2000 BC. He doesnt say how many
hours in a day, and Neugebauer (The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, Dover, page 86)
claims the Egyptians were the first to come up with twenty-four.)
The circle was divided into 360 degrees.
Notice that all these standards of measurement include multiples of 60 frequently
obviously, 60 was the Babylonians favorite number.
Number Systems: Ours, the Roman and the Babylonian
To appreciate what constitutes a good counting system, it is worthwhile reviewing
briefly our own system and that of the Romans. The Roman system is in a way
more primitive than ours: X always means 10, C means 100 and I means 1. (You
might be thinking: this isnt quite truethey reversed numbers to indicate
subtraction, such as IV for 4. In fact it appears they didnt, they used IIII, and IV is
more recent. Theres an article on all this in Wikipedia, which is interesting but
currently unreliable.)
By contrast, in our system 1 can mean 1 or 10 or 100 depending on where it
appears in the expressionthe 1 in 41 means a different quantity from the 1 in 145,
for example. We say the value of a symbol has positional dependenceits actual

value depends on where in the expression it appears. Our convention, as you well
know, is that the number to the far right in our system is the number of 1s, the
number to its immediate left is the number of 10s, to the left of that comes the
number of 1010s, then of 101010s and so on. We use the same set of
symbols, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 in each of these positions, so the value of such a
symbol in a number depends on its position in that number.
To express quantities less than 1, we use the decimal notation. We put a dot (in
some countries a comma is used) and it is understood that the number to the
immediate left of the dot is the number of 1s, that to the immediate right the
number of tenths (10-1 s in mathematical notation), the next number is the number
of hundredths (10-2 s) and so on. With this convention, is written .5 or 0.5 and
1/5 is .2. Unfortunately, 1/3 becomes .33333..., rather inconveniently, and 1/6 and
1/7 similarly go on for ever. (Actually, this decimal system with the dot is,
historically speaking, rather a recent inventionit was created by a Scotsman called
Napier about 400 years ago. )
To get back to comparing the Roman system with our own, notice that the Romans
did not have a 0, zero. This is why it is important to have a different symbol for ten
and one, X and I are easily distinguished. If we didn't have a zero, one and ten
would both be represented by 1, although we might be able to distinguish them in a
column of figures by placing them in different columns.
After those preliminary remarks, we are ready to look at the Babylonian system. Its
written on clay tablets thats why we still have original copies around!
Their number system has only two basic elements, the first of which is clear on
examining the first nine numbers:

Evidently, these nine numbers are all constructed of a single element, a mark easily
gouged with one twist of a stick in the soft clay, and the number of times this
element is repeated is the number represented. The sticks used to make the marks
were wedge shaped,
The numbers 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, are represented by the symbols:

It is clear that again we have simple repetition of a basic element, which we will
conveniently represent by <, and again its a mark not difficult to make in the soft
clay. Thus, any number between 1 and 59 is represented by a symbol from the
second diagram followed in the usual case by one from the first diagram, so 32
would be written <<<11, approximately.
When they get to 60, the Babylonians start again in a similar way to our starting
again at 10. Thus, 82 is written as 1<<11, where the first 1 represents 60.
So the Babylonian system is based on the number 60 the same way ours is based
on 10. Ours is called a decimal system, theirs a sexagesimal system.
There are some real problems with the Babylonian number system, the main one
being that nobody thought of having a zero, so both sixty and one look exactly the
same, that is both are represented by 1! Actually, its even worsesince there is no
decimal point, the way to write 1/2, which we write 0.5, for five tenths, they would
write <<<, for thirty sixtiethsbut with no zero, of course, and no dot either. So if
we see <<< on a clay tablet, we don't know if it means 1/2, 30 or for that matter
3060, that is, 1800.
This is in fact not as bad as it soundssixty is a very big factor, and it will usually be
clear from the context if <<< should be interpreted as 1/2 or 30. Also, in columns
of figures, a <<< representing 30 was often put to the left of <<< representing 1/2.
Fractions
In real life commercial transactions, simple addition and even multiplication are not
that difficult in most number systems. The hard part is division, in other words,
working with fractions, and this comes up all the time when resources must be
divided among several individuals. The Babylonian system is really wonderful for
fractions!
The most common fractions, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6 all are represented by a single
number (1/2= <<< , 1/3= << , 1/5= <11, etc.). That is, these fractions are exact
numbers of sixtiethssixty is the lowest number which exactly divides by 2, 3, 4, 5,
and 6. This is a vast improvement on the decimal system, which has infinite
recurrences for 1/3 and 1/6, and even needs two figures: .25.

(Of course, even in Babylonian, eventually we are forced to go to the second

sexagesimal number, which would be the number of sixtieths of sixtieths, that is,
of three-thousand-six-hundredths. For example, 1/8 is seven-and-a-half sixtieths, so
would be written as seven followed by thirtyfor seven sixtieths plus thirty sixtieths
of a sixtieth. And, 1/7 is as much of a headache as it is in our own system.)
Ancient Math Tables
In order to make their bookkeeping as painless as possible, the Babylonians had
math tables: clay tablets with whole lists of reciprocals. The reciprocal of a number
is what you have to multiply it by to get 1, so the reciprocal of 2 is 1/2 written 0.5 in
our system, the reciprocal of 5 is 1/5 written 0.2 and so on.
The point of having reciprocal tables is that dividing by something is the same as
multiplying by the reciprocal, so using the tables you can replace division by
multiplication, which is a lot easier.
Surviving clay tablet examples of Babylonian reciprocal tablets look like this:

11

<<<

111

<<

1111

<11111

11111

<11

111111

<

11111111

1111111 <<<

We have cheated a bit herethe numbers 4, 5, 6, etc. in both columns should really
have their 1s stacked as in the first figure above.

How Practical are Babylonian Weights and Measures?

Lets take as an example how much food a family needs. If they consume 120
shekels of grain each day, for example, thats 12 talents of grain per year. (One
talent = 3600 shekels). Just imagine the parallel calculation now: if the family
consumes 30 ounces of grain a day, what is that in tons per year? If you were
transported to the Babylon of four thousand years ago, you would hardly miss your
calculator! (Admittedly, the Babylonian calculation is a bit more difficult every six
years when they throw in an extra month.)
Pythagoras Theorem a Thousand Years before Pythagoras

Some of the clay tablets discovered contain lists of triplets of numbers, starting
with (3, 4, 5) and (5, 12, 13) which are the lengths of sides of right angled triangles,
obeying Pythagoras sums of squares formula. In particular, one tablet, now in
the Yale Babylonian Collection, this photograph by Bill Casselman, shows a picture
of a square with the diagonals marked, and the lengths of the lines are marked on
the figure: the side is marked <<< meaning thirty (fingers?) long, the diagonal is
marked: <<<<11 <<11111 <<<11111. This translates to 42, 25, 35, meaning 42
+ 25/60 + 35/3600. Using these figures, the ratio of the length of the diagonal to
the length of the side of the square works out to be 1.414213
Now, if we use Pythagoras theorem, the diagonal of a square forms with two of the
sides a right angled triangle, and if we take the sides to have length one, the length
of the diagonal squared equals 1 + 1, so the length of the diagonal is the square
root of 2. The figure on the clay tablet is incredibly accuratethe true value is
1.414214 Of course, this Babylonian value is far too accurate to have been found
by measurement from an accurate drawingit was clearly checked by arithmetic
multiplication by itself, giving a number very close to two.
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Early Greek Science: Thales to Plato

Michael Fowler, UVa Physics, 8/23/08

The Milesians
The

first recorded important

contributions to Greek science
are from the city of Miletus,
near the coast of what is now
Turkey, beginning with Thales in
about 585 B.C., followed by
Anaximander about 555 B.C.,
then Anaximenes in 535 B.C.
We shall argue below that
these Milesians were the first to
do real science, immediately
recognizable as such to a
modern scientist, as opposed to
developing new technologies.

The crucial contribution of Thales

to scientific thought was the discovery of nature.
By this, we mean the idea that
the natural phenomena we see
around us are explicable in terms of matter interacting by natural laws, and are not
the results of arbitrary acts by gods.
An example is Thales theory of earthquakes, which was that the (presumed flat)
earth is actually floating on a vast ocean, and disturbances in that ocean
occasionally cause the earth to shake or even crack, just as they would a large boat.
(Recall the Greeks were a seafaring nation.) The common Greek belief at the time
was that the earthquakes were caused by the anger of Poseidon, god of the sea.
Lightning was similarly the anger of Zeus. Later, Anaximander suggested lightning
was caused by clouds being split up by the wind, which in fact is not far from the
truth.
The main point here is that the gods are just not mentioned in analyzing these
phenomena. The Milesians view is that nature is a dynamic entity evolving in
accordance with some admittedly not fully understood laws, but not being

micromanaged by a bunch of gods using it to vent their anger or whatever on

hapless humanity.
An essential part of the Milesians success in developing a picture of nature was that
they engaged in open, rational, critical debate about each others ideas. It was
tacitly assumed that all the theories and explanations were directly competitive with
one another, and all should be open to public scrutiny, so that they could be
debated and judged. This is still the way scientists work. Each contribution, even
that of an Einstein, depends heavily on what has gone before.
The theories of the Milesians fall into two groups:
(1) theories regarding particular phenomena or problems, of the type discussed
above,
(2) speculations about the nature of the universe, and human life.
Concerning the universe, Anaximander suggested that the earth was a cylinder, and
the sun, moon and stars were located on concentric rotating cylinders: the first
recorded attempt at a mechanical model. He further postulated that the stars
themselves were rings of fire. Again, a very bold conjectureall heavenly bodies
had previously been regarded as living gods.
He also considered the problem of the origin of life, which is of course more difficult
to explain if you dont believe in gods! He suggested that the lower forms of life
might be generated by the action of sunlight on moist earth. He also realized that a
human baby is not self-sufficient for quite a long time, so postulated that the first
humans were born from a certain type of fish.
All three of these Milesians struggled with the puzzle of the origin of the universe,
what was here at the beginning, and what things are made of. Thales suggested
that in the beginning there was only water, so somehow everything was made of it.
Anaximander supposed that initially there was a boundless chaos, and the universe
grew from this as from a seed. Anaximenes had a more sophisticated approach, to
modern eyes. His suggestion was that originally there was only air (really meaning
a gas) and the liquids and solids we see around us were formed by condensation.
Notice that this means a simple initial state develops into our world using physical
processes which were already familiar. Of course this leaves a lot to explain, but its
quite similar to the modern view.

Early Geometry
One of the most important contributions of the Greeks was their development of
geometry, culminating in Euclids Elements, a giant textbook containing all the

known geometric theorems at that time (about 300 BC), presented in an elegant
logical fashion.
Notice first that the word geometry is made up of geo, meaning the earth, and
metry meaning measurement of, in Greek. (The same literal translations from the
Greek give geography as picturing the earth and geology as knowledge about the
earth. Of course, the precise meanings of all these words have changed somewhat
since they were first introduced.)
The first account we have of the beginnings of geometry is from the Greek historian
Herodotus, writing (in 440 B.C. or so) about the Egyptian king Sesotris (1300 B.C.):
This king moreover (so they said) divided the country among all the Egyptians by
giving each an equal square parcel of land, and made this the source of his
revenue, appointing the payment of a yearly tax. And any man who was robbed by
the river of a part of his land would come to Sesotris and declare what had befallen
him; then the king would send men to look into it and measure the space by which
the land was diminished, so that thereafter it should pay the appointed tax in
proportion to the loss. From this, to my thinking, the Greeks learnt the art of
measuring land...
On the other hand Aristotle, writing a century later, had a more academic, and
perhaps less plausible, theory of the rise of geometry:
..the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were
discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. That is
why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt, for there the priestly class was
allowed to be at leisure.
However, as Thomas Heath points out in A History of Greek Mathematics, page 122,
one might imagine that if this (that is, Aristotles theory) were true, Egyptian
geometry would have advanced beyond the purely practical stage to something
more like a theory or science of geometry. But the documents which have survived
do not give any grounds for this supposition; the art of geometry in the hands of the
priests never seems to have advanced beyond mere routine. The most important
available source of information about Egyptian mathematics is the Papyrus Rhind
written probably about 1700 BC, but copied from an original of the time of King
Amenemhat III (Twelfth Dynasty), say 2200 BC.
Heath goes on to give details of what appears in this document: areas of rectangles,
trapezia and triangles, areas of circles given as (8d/9)2, where d is the diameter,
corresponding to pi equal to 3.16 or so, about 1% off. There are approximate
volume measures for hemispherical containers, and volumes for pyramids.

(Actually

Another important Egyptian

source is the Moscow Papyrus,
which includes the very
practical problem of calculating
the volume of a pyramid!
with a flat top: look at the figure,
from Wikipedia.)

A
brief overview of the early history of
geometry, up to Euclid, has been written by the Greek author Proclus. He asserts
that geometry was first brought to Greece by Thales, after he spent some years in
Egypt.

The Pythagoreans: a Cult with a Theorem, and an Irrational Discovery

Pythagoras was born about 570 B.C. on the island of Samos (on the map above),
less than a hundred miles from Miletus, and was thus a contemporary of
Anaximenes. However, the island of Samos was ruled by a tyrant named
Polycrates, and to escape an unpleasant regime, Pythagoras moved to Croton, a
Greek town in southern Italy (at 39 05N, 17 7 30E), about 530 B.C.
Pythagoras founded what we would nowadays call a cult, a religious group with
strict rules about behavior, including diet (no beans), and a belief in the immortality
of the soul and reincarnation in different creatures. This of course contrasts with
the Milesians approach to life.
The Pythagoreans believed strongly that numbers, by which they meant the positive
integers 1,2,3, ..., had a fundamental, mystical significance. The numbers were a
kind of eternal truth, perceived by the soul, and not subject to the uncertainties of
perception by the ordinary senses. In fact, they thought that the numbers had a
physical existence, and that the universe was somehow constructed from them. In
support of this, they pointed out that different musical notes differing by an octave
or a fifth, could be produced by pipes (like a flute), whose lengths were in the ratios
of whole numbers, 1:2 and 2:3 respectively. Note that this is an experimental
verification of an hypothesis.
They felt that the motion of the heavenly bodies must somehow be a perfect
harmony, giving out a music we could not hear since it had been with us since birth.
Interestingly, they did not consider the earth to be at rest at the center of the
universe. They thought it was round, and orbited about a central point daily, to
account for the motion of the stars. Much was wrong with their picture of the
universe, but it was not geocentric, for religious reasons. They felt the earth was
not noble enough to be the center of everything, where they supposed there was a
central fire. (Actually there is some debate about precisely what their picture was,

but there is no doubt they saw the earth as round, and accounted for the stars
motion by the earths rotation.)
To return to their preoccupation with numbers, they coined the term square
number, for 4,9, etc., drawing square patterns of evenly spaced dots to illustrate
this idea. The first square number, 4, they equated with justice. 5 represented
marriage, of man (3) and woman (2). 7 was a mystical number. Later Greeks, like
Aristotle, made fun of all this.

The Square on the Hypotenuse

Pythagoras is of course most famous for the theorem about right angled triangles,
that the sum of the squares of the two sides enclosing the right angle is equal to the
square of the long side, called the hypotenuse.
This is easily proved by drawing two
diagrams, one having four copies of
the triangle arranged so that their
hypotenuses form a square, and their
right angles are all pointing outward,
forming a larger overall square, in
the other this larger square is divided
differently - the four triangles are
formed into two rectangles, set into
corners of the square, leaving over
two other square areas which are
seen to be the squares on the other
two sides.
You can prove it yourself by clicking
here!
Actually, it seems very probable that this result was known to the Babylonians a
thousand years earlier (see the discussion in the lecture on Babylon), and to the
Egyptians, who, for example, used lengths of rope 3, 4 and 5 units long to set up a
large right-angle for building and surveying purposes.

Rational and Irrational Numbers

As we discussed above, the Pythagoreans greatly revered the integers, the whole
numbers 1, 2, 3, , and felt that somehow they were the key to the universe. One
property of the integers well need is the distinction between prime numbers and
the rest: prime numbers have no divisors. So, no even number is prime, because all
even numbers divide exactly by 2. You can map out the primes by writing down all

the integers, say up to 100, cross out all those divisible by 2 (not counting 2 itself),
then cross out those divisible by 3, then 5, etc. The numbers surviving this process
have no divisors, they are the primes: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37,
Now, any integer can be written as a product of primes: just divide it systematically
first by 2, then if it divides, by 2 again, until you get something that doesnt divide
by 2 (and give a whole number). Then redo the process with 3, then 5, until youre
done. You can then write, for example, 12 = 2x2x3, 70 = 2x5x7 and so on.
Notice now that if you express a number as a product of its prime factors in this
way, then the square of that number is the product of the same factors, but each
factor appears twice as often: (70)2 = 2x2x5x5x7x7. And, in particular, note that
the square of an even number has 2 appearing at least twice in its list of factors,
but the square of an odd number must still be odd: if 2 wasnt on the list of factors
of the number, then it wont be on the list for its square, since this is the same list
with the factors just appearing twice as often.
Of course, from the earliest times, from Babylon and Egypt, people had been
dealing with numbers that were not whole numbers---fractions, for example, or
numbers which were integers plus fractions, such as one-and-a-half. This didnt
bother the Pythagoreans too much, because after all fractions are simply ratios of
two whole numbers, so they fit nicely into a slightly extended scheme.
Lets think about all possible numbers between one and ten, say, including all those
with fractional parts, such as 3/2 or 4567/891, to choose a number at random.
Suppose we take a piece of paper, mark on it points for the whole numbers 1, 2,
3, ...,10. Then we put marks for the halves, then the quarters and three quarters.
Next we put marks at the thirds, 4/3, 5/3, 7/3, up to 29/3. Then we do the fifths,
then the sevenths, ... Then we buy a supercomputer with a great graphics program
to put in the higher fractions one after the other at lightening speed!
The question is: is this list of fractions all the numbers there are between one and
ten?
In other words, can we prove that theres a number you could never ever reach by
this method, no matter how fast your computer?
Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Pythagoreans figured out the answer to
this question.
The answer is yes: there are numbers which are not fractionsthat is, they cannot
be expressed as ratios of integers.
This discovery greatly upset the Pythagoreans, since they revered the integers as
the mystical foundation of the universe, and now apparently they were not even

sufficient foundation for the numbers. Ironically, this unnerving discovery followed
from applying their very own theoremPythagoras theoremto the simplest
possible right-angled triangle: half a square, a triangle with its two shorter sides
both equal to one.
This means its long side-the hypotenusehas a length whose square is two.
We shall now go through their argument showing that the length of this longest side
cannot be written as a ratio of two integers, no matter how large you choose the
integers to be.
The basic strategy of the proof is to assume it can be written as a ratio of integers,
then prove this leads to a contradiction.
So, we assume we can write this numberthe length of the longest sideas a ratio
of two whole numbers, in other words a fraction m/n. This is the length whose
square is 2, so m/n = 2, from which m = 2n.
Now all we have to do is to find two whole numbers such that the square of one is
exactly twice the square of the other. How difficult can this be? To get some idea,
lets write down the squares of some numbers and look:
12 = 1, 22 = 4, 32 = 9, 42 = 16, 52 = 25, 62 = 36, 72 = 49, 82 = 64, 92 = 81, 102 =
100, 112 = 121, 122 = 144, 132 = 169, 142 = 196, 152 = 225, 162 = 256, 172 = 289,
.
On perusing this table, you will see we have some near misses: 3 2 is only one more
than twice 22, 72 is only one less than twice 52, and 172 is only one more than twice
122. Its difficult to believe that if we keep at it, were not going to find a direct hit
eventually.
In fact, though, it turns out this never happens, and thats what the Pythagoreans
proved. Heres how they did it.
First, assume we canceled any common factors between numerator and
denominator.
This means that m and n cant both be even.
Next, notice that the square of an even number is even. This is easy to check:
if a is an even number, it can be written a = 2b, where b is another whole number.
Therefore, a2 = 2x2xb2, so on fact a2 is not only even, it has 4 as a factor.

On the other hand, the square of an odd number is always odd. If a number
doesnt have 2 as a factor, multiplying it by itself wont give a number that has 2 as
a factor.
Now, back to the length of the squares diagonal, m/n, with m = 2n.
Evidently, m must be even, because it equals 2n, which has a factor 2.
Therefore, from what we have just said above about squares of even and odd
numbers, m must itself be even.
This means, though, that m must be divisible by 4.
This means that 2n must be divisible by 4, since m = 2n -- but in this case, n
must be divisible by 2!
It follows that n must itself be even --- BUT we stated at the beginning that we
had canceled any common factors between m and n. This would include any factor
of 2, so they cant both be even!
Thus a watertight logical argument has led to a contradiction.
The only possible conclusion is: the original assumption is incorrect.
This means that the diagonal length of a square of side 1 cannot be written as the
ratio of two integers, no matter how large we are willing to let them be.
This was the first example of an irrational numberone that is not a ratio of
integers.
Legend has it that the Pythagoreans who made this discovery public died in a
shipwreck.

Whats so Important about Irrational Numbers?

The historical significance of the above proof is that it establishes something new in
mathematics, which couldnt have been guessed, and, in fact, something the
discoverers didnt want to be true. Although fractions very close to the square root
of 2 had been found by the Babylonians and Egyptians, there is no hint that they
considered the possibility that no fraction would ever be found representing the
square root of 2 exactly.
The kind of abstract argument here is far removed from practical considerations
where geometry is used for measurement. In fact, it is irrelevant to measurement -

one can easily find approximations better than any possible measuring apparatus.
The reason the Pythagoreans worked on this problem is because they thought they
were investigating the fundamental structure of the universe.
Abstract arguments of this type, and the beautiful geometric arguments the Greeks
constructed during this period and slightly later, seemed at the time to be merely
mental games, valuable for developing the mind, as Plato emphasized. In fact,
these arguments have turned out, rather surprisingly, to be on the right track to
modern science, as we shall see.

Change and Constancy in the Physical World

Over the next century or so, 500 B.C.- 400 B.C., the main preoccupation of
philosophers in the Greek world was that when we look around us, we see things
changing all the time. How is this to be reconciled with the feeling that the universe
must have some constant, eternal qualities? Heraclitus, from Ephesus, claimed
that everything flows, and even objects which appeared static had some inner
tension or dynamism. Parminedes, an Italian Greek, came to the opposite
conclusion, that nothing ever changes, and apparent change is just an illusion, a
result of our poor perception of the world.
This may not sound like a very promising debate, but in fact it is, because, as we
shall see, trying to analyze what is changing and what isnt in the physical world
leads to the ideas of elements, atoms and conservation laws, like the
conservation of matter.
The first physicist to give a clear formulation of a possible resolution of the problem
of change was Empedocles around 450 B.C., who stated that everything was
made up of four elements: earth, water, air and fire. He asserted that the
elements themselves were eternal and unchanging. Different substances
were made up of the elements in different proportions, just as all colors can be
created by mixing three primary colors in appropriate proportions. Forces of
attraction and repulsion (referred to as love and strife) between these elements
cause coming together and separation, and thus apparent change in substances.
Another physicist, Anaxogoras, argued that no natural substance can be more
elementary than any other, so there were an infinite number of elements, and
everything had a little bit of everything else in it. He was particularly interested in
nutrition, and argued that food contained small amounts of hair, teeth, etc., which
our bodies are able to extract and use.
The most famous and influential of the fifth century B.C. physicists, though, were
the atomists, Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera. They claimed
that the physical world consisted of atoms in constant motion in a void, rebounding
or cohering as they collide with each other. Change of all sorts is thus accounted for

on a basic level by the atoms separating and recombining to form different

materials. The atoms themselves do not change. This sounds amazingly like our
modern picture, but of course it was all conjecture, and when they got down to
relating the atoms to physical properties, Democritus suggested, for example, that
things made of sharp, pointed atoms tasted acidic, those of large round atoms
tasted sweet. There was also some confusion between the idea of physical
indivisibility and that of mathematical indivisibility, meaning something that only
exists at a point. The atoms of Democritus had shapes, but it is not clear if he
realized this implied they could, at least conceptually, be divided. This caused real
problems later on, especially since at that time there was no experimental backing
for an atomic theory, and it was totally rejected by Aristotle and others.

Hippocrates and his Followers

It is also worth mentioning that at this same time, on the island of Kos (see map)
just a few miles from Miletus, lived the first great doctor, Hippocrates. He and his
followers adopted the Milesian point of view, applied to disease, that it was not
caused by the gods, even epilepsy, which was called the sacred disease, but there
was some rational explanation, such as infection, which could perhaps be treated.
Heres a quote from one of Hippocrates followers, writing about epilepsy in about
400 B.C.:
It seems to me that the disease called sacred has a natural cause, just as other
diseases have. Men think it divine merely because they do not understand it. But if
they called everything divine that they did not understand, there would be no end
of divine things! If you watch these fellows treating the disease, you see them
use all kinds of incantations and magicbut they are also very careful in regulating
diet. Now if food makes the disease better or worse, how can they say it is the gods
who do this? It does not really matter whether you call such things divine or not.
In Nature, all things are alike in this, in that they can be traced to preceding causes.
The Hippocratic doctors criticized the philosophers for being too ready with
postulates and hypotheses, and not putting enough effort into careful observation.
These doctors insisted on careful, systematic observation in diagnosing disease, and
a careful sorting out of what was relevant and what was merely coincidental. Of
course, this approach is the right one in all sciences.

Plato
In the fourth century B.C., Greek intellectual life centered increasingly in Athens,
where first Plato and then Aristotle established schools, the Academy and the
Lyceum respectively, which were really the first universities, and attracted
philosophers and scientists from all over Greece.

Actually, this all began somewhat earlier with Socrates, Platos teacher, who,
however, was not a scientist, and so not central to our discussion here. One of
Socrates main concerns was how to get the best people to run the state, and what
were the ideal qualities to be looked for in such leaders. He believed in free and
open discussion of this and other political questions, and managed to make very
clear to everybody that he thought the current leaders of Athens were a poor lot. In
fact, he managed to make an enemy of almost everyone in a position of power, and
he was eventually brought to trial for corrupting the young with his teachings. He
was found guilty, and put to death.
This had a profound effect on his pupil Plato, a Greek aristocrat, who had originally
intended to involve himself in politics. Instead, he became an academic-in fact, he
invented the term! He, too, pondered the question of what is the ideal society, and
his famous book The Republic is his suggested answer. He was disillusioned with
Athenian democracy after what had happened to Socrates, and impressed with
Sparta, an authoritarian state which won a war, the Peloponnesian war, against
Athens. Hence his Republic has rather a right wing, antidemocratic flavor.
However, he tries to ensure that the very best people in each generation are
running the state, and he considers, being a philosopher, that the best possible
training for these future leaders is a strong grounding in logic, ethics and dealing
with abstract ideas. This is made particularly clear on p 67,8 of Lloyd, where a
quote from the Republic is given, in which Socrates is emphasizing how important it
is for future leaders to study astronomy. Glaucon agrees that astronomy is useful in
navigation, military matters and accurately determining seasons for planting, etc.,
to which Socrates responds emphatically that these reasons are not nearly as
important as the training in abstract reasoning it provides.
Plato, then, had a rather abstract view of science, reminiscent of the Pythagoreans.
In particular, he felt that the world we apprehend with our senses is less important
than the underlying world of pure eternal forms we perceive with our reason or
intellect, as opposed to our physical senses. This naturally led him to downgrade
the importance of careful observation, for instance in astronomy, and to emphasize
the analytical, mathematical approach.
Plato believed the universe was created by a rational god, who took chaotic matter
and ordered it, but he also believed that because of the inherent properties of the
matter itself, his god was not omnipotent, in the sense that there were limits as to
how good the universe could be: one of his examples was that smart people have
large brains (he thought), but if you make the brain too large by having a very thin
skull, they wont last long! He felt this need to compromise was the explanation of
the presence of evil in a universe created by a beneficent god.
Platos concentration on perfect underlying forms did in fact lead to a major
contribution to astronomy, despite his own lack of interest in observation. He

stated that the main problem in astronomy was to account for the observed rather
irregular motion of the planets by some combination of perfect motions, that is,
circular motions. This turned out to be a very fruitful way of formulating the
problem.
Platos theory of matter was based on Empedocles four elements, fire, air, water
and earth. However, he did not stop there. He identified each of these elements
with a perfect form, one of the regular solids, fire with the tetrahedron, air with the
octahedron, water with the icosahedron and earth with the cube. He divided each
face of these solids into elementary triangles (45 45 90 and 30 60 90) which he
regarded as the basic units of matter. He suggested that water could be
decomposed into fire and air by the icosahedron breaking down to two octahedra
and a tetrahedron. This looks like a kind of atomic or molecular theory, but his
strong conviction that all properties of matter could eventually be deduced by pure
thought, without resort to experiment, proved counterproductive to the further
development of scientific understanding for centuries. It should perhaps be
mentioned, though, that the latest theory in elementary particle physics, string
theory, known modestly as the theory of everything, also claims that all physical
phenomena should be deducible from a very basic mathematical model having in its
formulation no adjustable parametersa perfect form.

References
Lloyd, G. E. R. (1970). Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle, Norton.
Heath, Sir Thomas (1921, 1981). A History of Greek Mathematics, Volume I. Dover.
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Motion in the Heavens: Stars, Sun, Moon, Planets

Michael Fowler Physics Department, UVa 9/2/2008
Introduction
The purpose of this lecture is just to review the various motions observed in the
heavens in the simplest, most straightforward way. We shall ignore for the moment
refinements like tiny deviations from simple motion, but return to them later.
It is illuminating to see how these observed motions were understood in early times,
and how we see them now. Of course, you know the Earth rotates and orbits around
the Sun. However, I want you to be bilingual for this session: to be able to visualize
also the ancient view of a fixed Earth, and rotating heavens, and be able to think
from both points of view.

This is really largely an exercise in three-dimensional visualizationthats the hard

part! But without some effort to see the big picture, you will not be able to
appreciate some really nice things, like the phases of the moon, eclipses, and even
just the seasons. You really need to have a clear picture of the Earth orbiting
around the Sun and at the same time rotating about an axis tilted relative to the
plane the orbit lies in, with the axis of rotation always pointing at the same star, and
not changing its direction as the Earth goes around the Sun. Then you must add to
your picture the Moon orbiting around the Earth once a month, the plane of its orbit
tilted five degrees from the plane of the Earths orbit around the Sun. Then we add
in the planets .
Some of these topics are treated nicely in Theories of the World from Antiquity to
the Copernican Revolution, by Michael J. Crowe, Dover.
Looking at the Stars
There is one star that always stays in the same place in the sky, as seen from
Charlottesville (or anywhere else in the northern hemisphere). This is Polaris, the
North Star. All the other stars move in circular paths around Polaris, with a period of
24 hours. This was understood in ancient times by taking the stars to be fixed to the
inside surface of a large sphere, the starry vault, which was the outer boundary of
the Universe, and contained everything else.
Of course, we only see the stars move around part of their circular path, because
when the Sun comes up, the bright blue scattered Sunlightthe blue skydrowns
out the starlight. If there were no atmosphere, we would see the stars all the time,
and see the complete circles for those that stayed above the horizon.
Try to picture yourself inside this large, spherical rotating starry vault with stars
attached, and visualize the paths of the stars as they wheel overhead. Think about
the paths the stars would take as seen from the North Pole, from the Equator, and
from Charlottesville.
Motion of the Sun
Every day the Sun rises in the east, moves through the southern part of the sky and
sets in the west. If there were no atmosphere so that we could see Polaris all the
time, would the Sun also be going in a circular path centered on Polaris?
The answer is yes. (Well, almost).
If you were at the North Pole in the middle of summer, lying on your back, you
would see the Sun go around in a circle in the sky, anticlockwise. The circle would
be centered on Polaris, which is directly overhead, except for the fact that you
wouldnt see Polaris all summer, since it wouldnt be dark. Here of course we see
the Sun circling part of the time, and see Polaris the other part of the time, so it isnt

completely obvious that the Suns circling Polaris. Does the Sun circle clockwise or
anticlockwise for us? It depends on how you look at itin winter, when its low in
the sky, we tend to look from above, see the Sun rise in the east, move in a low
path via the south towards the west, and that looks clockwiseunless youre lying
on your back.
Actually the Sun moves very slightly each day relative to the starry vault. This
would be obvious if there were no atmosphere, so we could just watch it, but this
can also be figured out, as the Greeks and before them the Babylonians did, by
looking closely at the stars in the west just after sunset and seeing where the Sun
fits into the pattern.
It turns out that the Sun moves almost exactly one degree per day against the
starry vault, so that after one year its back where it started. This is no coincidence
no doubt this is why the Babylonians chose their angular unit as the degree (they
also liked 60).
Anyway, the Sun goes around in the circular path along with the starry vault, and at
the same time slowly progresses along a path in the starry vault. This path is called
the ecliptic.
If we visualize Polaris as the North Pole of the starry vault, and then imagine the
vaults Equator, the ecliptic is a great circle tilted at 23 degrees to the
equator. The Sun moves along the ecliptic from west to east. (Imagine the Earth
were not rotating at all relative to the stars. How would the Sun appear to move
through the year?)
The motion of the Sun across the starry vault has been known at least since the
Babylonians, and interpreted in many colorful ways. Compare our present view of
the stars, thermonuclear reactions in the sky, with the ancient view (see
Hemisphaerium Boreale, Appendix to Heaths Greek Astronomy).
Many of the ancients believed, to varying degrees, that there were spirits in the
heavens, and the arrangements of stars suggested animals, and some people.
The Suns path through all this, the ecliptic, endlessly repeated year after year, and
the set of constellations (the word just means group of stars) and the animals
they represented became known as the Zodiac. ( zo being the same Greek word
for animal that appears in Zoo.) So this is your sign: where in its path through this
zoo was the Sun on the day you were born?

Notice that the print shows the Suns path through the northern hemisphere, that is,
for our summer. The furthest north (closest to Polaris) it gets is on June 21, when it
is in Cancer, it is then overhead on the Tropic of Cancer, 23 degrees north of the
Equator.
In other words, the spherical Earths surface is visualized as having the same center
as the larger sphere of the starry vault, so when in its journey across this vault the
Sun reaches the tropic of the vault, it will naturally be overhead at the
corresponding point on the Earths tropic which lies directly below the tropic on the
vault.

Heres a more spectacular demonstration of the same thing: notice, for example,
the Plough (also known as Ursa Major, the great bear) in the tail and body of the
bear, and the familiar astrological collection of animals around the zodiac (from
http://www.atlascoelestis.com/5.htm )

Motion of the Moon against the Starry Vault

The Sun goes around the starry vault once a year, the Moon goes completely
around every month.
Does it follow the same path as the Sun?
The answer is no, but its close. It always stays within 5 degrees of the ecliptic, so it
goes through the same set of constellations, the Moon is in the Seventh House
and all that. In fact, the housesthe signs of the Zodiacare defined to occupy a
band of the stars that stretches eight degrees either way from the ecliptic, because
that turns out to be wide enough that the Sun, Moon and all the planets lie within it.
How can we understand the Moons motion from our present perspective? If the
Earth, the Moon and the Sun were all in the same plane, in other words, if the
moons orbit was in the same plane as the Earths orbit around the Sun, the Moon

would follow the ecliptic. In fact, the Moons orbit is tilted at 5 degrees to the
Earths orbit around the Sun.
This also explains why eclipses of the Moon (and Sun) dont happen every month,
which they would if everything was in the same plane. In fact, they only occur when
the moons path crosses the ecliptic, hence the name.
A nice three-dimensional representation, published by Cellario in 1627, can be
found at http://www.atlascoelestis.com/Cell%2009.htm : here it is:

Notice the band representing the zodiac.

Motion of the Planets
Since ancient times it has been known that five of the stars moved across the sky:
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. They were termed planets which simply
means wanderers.
Are their paths in the starry vault also related to the ecliptic?

The answer is yes. They all stay within 8 degrees of the ecliptic, and in fact this is
the definition of the Zodiac: the band of sky within eight degrees of the ecliptic, and
for this reason.
Do they go all the way round?
Yes they do, but Mercury never gets more than 28 degrees away from the Sun, and
Venus never more than 46 degrees. Thus as the Sun travels around the ecliptic,
these two swing backwards and forwards across the Sun.
The other planets are not tethered to the Sun in the same way, but they also have
some notable behaviorin particular, they occasionally loop backwards for a few
weeks before resuming their steady motion.
Cultural note: an attempt was made about the same time by Julius Schiller to
replace the barbaric twelve signs of the zodiac with the twelve apostles:
http://www.atlascoelestis.com/epi%20schiller%20cellario.htm

It didnt catch on.

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Aristotle
Michael Fowler, U. Va. Physics, 9/3/2008

Beginnings of Science and Philosophy in Athens

Let us first recap briefly the emergence of philosophy and science in Athens after around 450
B.C. It all began with Socrates, who was born in 470 B.C. Socrates was a true philosopher, a
lover of wisdom, who tried to elicit the truth by what has become known as the Socratic method,
in which by a series of probing questions he forced successive further clarification of thought. Of
course, such clarity often reveals that the other persons ideas dont in fact make much sense, so
that although Socrates made a lot of things much clearer, he wasnt a favorite of many
establishment politicians. For example, he could argue very convincingly that traditional
morality had no logical basis. He mostly lectured to the sons of well-to-do aristocrats, one of
whom was Plato, born in 428 B.C. Plato was a young man when Athens was humiliated by
Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and Plato probably attributed the loss to Athens being a
democracy, as opposed to the kind of fascist war-based state Sparta was. Plato founded an
Academy. The name came (at least in legend) from one Academus, a landowner on whose estate
Plato and other philosophers met regularly. The important point is that this was the first
university. All the people involved were probably aristocrats, and they discussed everything:
politics, economics, morality, philosophy, mathematics and science. One of their main concerns
was to find what constituted an ideal city-state. Democracy didnt seem to have worked very
well in their recent past. Platos ideas are set out in the Republic.

Platos Idea of a Good Education

What is interesting about the Republic from our point of view is the emphasis on a good
education for the elite group in charge of Platos ideal society. In particular, Plato considered
education in mathematics and astronomy to be excellent ways of sharpening the mind. He
believed that intense mental exercise of this kind had the same effect on the mind that a rigorous
physical regimen did on the body. Students at the Academy covered a vast range of subjects, but
there was a sign over the door stating that some knowledge of mathematics was needed to enter
nothing else was mentioned! Plato in particular loved geometry, and felt that the beauty of the
five regular solids he was the first to categorize meant they must be fundamental to nature, they
must somehow be the shapes of the atoms. Notice that this approach to physics is not heavily
dependent on observation and experiment.

Aristotle and Alexander

We turn now to the third member of this trio, Aristotle,
born in 384 B.C. in Stagira, in Thrace, at the northern end
of the Aegean, near Macedonia. Aristotles father was the
family physician of King Philip of Macedonia. At the age
of eighteen, Aristotle came to Athens to study at Platos
Academy, and stayed there twenty years until Platos
death in 348 B.C. (Statue is a Roman copy of a Greek
original, in the Louvre, photographer Eric Gaba
(User:Sting), July 2005.)
Five years after Platos death, Aristotle took a position as
tutor to King Philip of Macedonias thirteen year old son
Alexander. He stayed for three years. It is not clear what
impact, if any, Aristotles lessons had, but Alexander, like
his father, was a great admirer of Greek civilization, even though the Athenians considered
Macedonia the boondocks. In fact, when his father Philip died in 336 B.C., Alexander did his
best to spread Greek civilization as far as he could. Macedonia had an excellent army, and over
the next thirteen years Alexander organized Greece as a federation of city states, conquered
Persia, the Middle East, Egypt, southern Afghanistan, some of Central Asia and the Punjab in
India.
The picture below is a fortress built by Alexanders army in Herat, Afghanistan, and still
standing. (Picture from http://flickr.com/photos/koldo/67606119/ , author koldo / Koldo
Hormaza .)
He founded Greek cities in many places, the greatest being Alexandria in Egypt, which in fact
became the most important center of Greek science later on, and without which all of Greek
learning might have been lost. The Greek cities became restless, predictably but rather
ungratefully, when he demanded to be treated as a god. He died of a fever at age 33.

Aristotle
Founds the
Lyceum
Aristotle came back
to Athens in 335
B.C., and spent the
next twelve years
running his own
version of an
academy, which was
called the Lyceum,
named after the
place in Athens
where it was located, an old temple of Apollo. (French high schools are named lycee after
Aristotles establishment.) Aristotles preferred mode of operation was to spend a lot of time
walking around talking with his colleagues, then write down his arguments. The Aristotelians are
often called the Peripatetics: people who walk around.
Aristotle wrote extensively on all subjects: politics, metaphysics, ethics, logic and science. He
didnt care for Platos rather communal Utopia, in which the women were shared by the men,
and the children raised by everybody, because for one thing he feared the children would be
raised by nobody. His ideal society was one run by cultured gentlemen. He saw nothing wrong
with slavery, provided the slave was naturally inferior to the master, so slaves should not be
Greeks. This all sounds uncomfortably similar to Jeffersons Virginia, perhaps not too surprising
since Greek was a central part of a gentlemans education in Jeffersons day.

Aristotles Science
Aristotles approach to science differed from Platos. He agreed that the highest human faculty
was reason, and its supreme activity was contemplation. However, in addition to studying what
he called first philosophy - metaphysics and mathematics, the things Plato had worked on,
Aristotle thought it also very important to study second philosophy: the world around us, from
physics and mechanics to biology. Perhaps being raised in the house of a physician had given
him an interest in living things.
What he achieved in those years in Athens was to begin a school of organized scientific inquiry
on a scale far exceeding anything that had gone before. He first clearly defined what was
scientific knowledge, and why it should be sought. In other words, he single-handedly invented

science as the collective, organized enterprise it is today. Platos Academy had the equivalent of a
university mathematics department, Aristotle had the first science department, truly excellent in
biology, but, as we shall see, a little weak in physics. After Aristotle, there was no comparable
professional science enterprise for over 2,000 years, and his work was of such quality that it was
accepted by all, and had long been a part of the official orthodoxy of the Christian Church 2,000
years later. This was unfortunate, because when Galileo questioned some of the assertions
concerning simple physics, he quickly found himself in serious trouble with the Church.

Aristotles Method
Aristotles method of investigation varied from one natural science to another, depending on the
problems encountered, but it usually included:
1

defining the subject matter

considering the difficulties involved by reviewing the generally accepted

views on the subject, and suggestions of earlier writers

presenting his own arguments and solutions.

Again, this is the pattern modern research papers follow, Aristotle was laying down the standard
professional approach to scientific research. The arguments he used were of two types:
dialectical, that is, based on logical deduction; and empirical, based on practical considerations.
Aristotle often refuted an opposing argument by showing that it led to an absurd conclusion, this
is called reductio ad absurdum (reducing something to absurdity). As we shall see later, Galileo
used exactly this kind of argument against Aristotle himself, to the great annoyance of
Aristotelians 2,000 years after Aristotle.
Another possibility was that an argument led to a dilemma: an apparent contradiction. However,
dilemmas could sometimes be resolved by realizing that there was some ambiguity in a
definition, say, so precision of definitions and usage of terms is essential to productive discussion
in any discipline.

Causes
In contrast to Plato, who felt the only worthwhile science to be the contemplation of abstract
forms, Aristotle practiced detailed observation and dissection of plants and animals, to try to
understand how each fitted into the grand scheme of nature, and the importance of the different
organs of animals. His motivation is made clear by the following quote from him (in Lloyd,
p105):

For even in those kinds [of animals] that are not attractive to the senses, yet to the intellect the
craftsmanship of nature provides extraordinary pleasures for those who can recognize the causes
in things and who are naturally inclined to philosophy.
His study of nature was a search for causes. What, exactly are these causes? He gave some
examples (we follow Lloyds discussion here). He stated that any object (animal, plant,
inanimate, whatever) had four attributes:

matter

form

moving cause

final cause

For a table, the matter is wood, the form is the shape, the moving cause is the carpenter and the
final cause is the reason the table was made in the first place, for a family to eat at, for example.
For man, he thought the matter was provided by the mother, the form was a rational two-legged
animal, the moving cause was the father and the final cause was to become a fully grown human
being. He did not believe nature to be conscious, he believed this final cause to be somehow
innate in a human being, and similarly in other organisms. Of course, fulfilling this final cause is
not inevitable, some accident may intervene, but apart from such exceptional circumstances,
nature is regular and orderly.
To give another example of this central concept, he thought the final cause of an acorn was to
be an oak tree. This has also been translated by Bertrand Russell (History of Western Philosophy)
as the nature of an acorn is to become an oak tree. It is certainly very natural on viewing the
living world, especially the maturing of complex organisms, to view them as having innately the
express purpose of developing into their final form.
It is interesting to note that this whole approach to studying nature fits very well with
Christianity. The idea that every organism is beautifully crafted for a particular function - its
final cause - in the grand scheme of nature certainly leads naturally to the thought that all this
has been designed by somebody.

Biology
Aristotles really great contribution to natural science was in biology. Living creatures and their
parts provide far richer evidence of form, and of final cause in the sense of design for a
particular purpose, than do inanimate objects. He wrote in detail about five hundred different
animals in his works, including a hundred and twenty kinds of fish and sixty kinds of insect. He

was the first to use dissection extensively. In one famous example, he gave a precise description
of a kind of dog-fish that was not seen again by scientists until the nineteenth century, and in fact
his work on this point was disbelieved for centuries.
Thus both Aristotle and Plato saw in the living creatures around them overwhelming evidence for
final causes, that is to say, evidence for design in nature, a different design for each species to
fit it for its place in the grand scheme of things. Empedocles, on the other hand, suggested that
maybe creatures of different types could come together and produce mixed offspring, and those
well adapted to their surroundings would survive. This would seem like an early hint of
Darwinism, but it was not accepted, because as Aristotle pointed out, men begat men and oxen
begat oxen, and there was no evidence of the mixed creatures Empedocles suggested.
Although this idea of the nature of things accords well with growth of animals and plants, it
leads us astray when applied to the motion of inanimate objects, as we shall see.

Elements
Aristotles theory of the basic constituents of matter looks to a modern scientist perhaps
something of a backward step from the work of the atomists and Plato. Aristotle assumed all
substances to be compounds of four elements: earth, water, air and fire, and each of these to be a
combination of two of four opposites, hot and cold, and wet and dry. (Actually, the words he
used for wet and dry also have the connotation of softness and hardness).
Aristotles whole approach is more in touch with the way things present themselves to the senses,
the way things really seem to be, as opposed to abstract geometric considerations. Hot and cold,
wet and dry are qualities immediately apparent to anyone, this seems a very natural way to
describe phenomena. He probably thought that the Platonic approach in terms of abstract
concepts, which do not seem to relate to our physical senses but to our reason, was a completely
wrongheaded way to go about the problem. It has turned out, centuries later, that the atomic and
mathematical approach was on the right track after all, but at the time, and in fact until relatively
recently, Aristotle seemed a lot closer to reality. He discussed the properties of real substances in
terms of their elemental composition at great length, how they reacted to fire or water, how, for
example, water evaporates on heating because it goes from cold and wet to hot and wet,
becoming air, in his view. Innumerable analyses along these lines of commonly observed
phenomena must have made this seem a coherent approach to understanding the natural world.

Dynamics: Motion, And Why Things Move

It is first essential to realize that the world Aristotle saw around him in everyday life was very
different indeed from that we see today. Every modern child has since birth seen cars and planes
moving around, and soon finds out that these things are not alive, like people and animals. In

contrast, most of the motion seen in fourth century Greece was people, animals and birds, all
very much alive. This motion all had a purpose, the animal was moving to someplace it would
rather be, for some reason, so the motion was directed by the animals will. For Aristotle, this
motion was therefore fulfilling the nature of the animal, just as its natural growth fulfilled the
nature of the animal.
To account for motion of things obviously not alive, such as a stone dropped from the hand, he
extended the concept of the nature of something to inanimate matter. He suggested that the
motion of such inanimate objects could be understood by postulating that elements tend to seek
their natural place in the order of things, so earth moves downwards most strongly, water flows
downwards too, but not so strongly, since a stone will fall through water. In contrast, air moves
up (bubbles in water) and fire goes upwards most strongly of all, since it shoots upward through
air. This general theory of how elements move has to be elaborated, of course, when applied to
real materials, which are mixtures of elements. He would conclude that wood, say, has both earth
and air in it, since it does not sink in water.

Natural Motion and Violent Motion

Of course, things also sometimes move because they are pushed. A stones natural tendency, if
left alone and unsupported, is to fall, but we can lift it, or even throw it through the air. Aristotle
termed such forced motion violent motion as opposed to natural motion. The term violent
here connotes that some external force is applied to the body to cause the motion. (Of course,
from the modern point of view, gravity is an external force that causes a stone to fall, but even
Galileo did not realize that. Before Newton, the falling of a stone was considered natural motion
that did not require any outside help.)
(Question: I am walking steadily upstairs carrying a large stone when I stumble and both I and
the stone go clattering down the stairs. Is the motion of the stone before the stumble natural or
violent? What about the motion of the stone (and myself) after the stumble?)

Aristotles Laws of Motion

Aristotle was the first to think quantitatively about the speeds involved in these movements. He
made two quantitative assertions about how things fall (natural motion):
1

Heavier things fall faster, the speed being proportional to the weight.

The speed of fall of a given object depends inversely on the density of the
medium it is falling through, so, for example, the same body will fall twice as
fast through a medium of half the density.

Notice that these rules have a certain elegance, an appealing quantitative simplicity. And, if you
drop a stone and a piece of paper, its clear that the heavier thing does fall faster, and a stone
falling through water is definitely slowed down by the water, so the rules at first appear
plausible. The surprising thing is, in view of Aristotles painstaking observations of so many
things, he didnt check out these rules in any serious way. It would not have taken long to find
out if half a brick fell at half the speed of a whole brick, for example. Obviously, this was not
something he considered important.
From the second assertion above, he concluded that a vacuum cannot exist, because if it did,
since it has zero density, all bodies would fall through it at infinite speed which is clearly
nonsense.
For violent motion, Aristotle stated that the speed of the moving object was in direct proportion
to the applied force.
This means first that if you stop pushing, the object stops moving. This certainly sounds like a
reasonable rule for, say, pushing a box of books across a carpet, or a Grecian ox dragging a
plough through a field. (This intuitively appealing picture, however, fails to take account of the
large frictional force between the box and the carpet. If you put the box on a sled and pushed it
across ice, it wouldnt stop when you stop pushing. Galileo realized the importance of friction in
these situations.)

Planetary Dynamics
The idea that motion (of inanimate objects) can be accounted for in terms of them seeking their
natural place clearly cannot be applied to the planets, whose motion is apparently composed of
circles. Aristotle therefore postulated that the heavenly bodies were not made up of the four
elements earth, water, air and fire, but of a fifth, different, element called aither, whose natural
motion was circular. This was not very satisfying for various reasons. Somewhere between here
and the moon a change must take place, but where? Recall that Aristotle did not believe that
there was a void anywhere. If the sun has no heat component, why does sunlight seem so warm?
He thought it somehow generated heat by friction from the suns motion, but this wasnt very
convincing, either.

Aristotles Achievements
To summarize: Aristotles philosophy laid out an approach to the investigation of all natural
phenomena, to determine form by detailed, systematic work, and thus arrive at final causes. His
logical method of argument gave a framework for putting knowledge together, and deducing new
results. He created what amounted to a fully-fledged professional scientific enterprise, on a scale
comparable to a modern university science department. It must be admitted that some of his

work - unfortunately, some of the physics - was not up to his usual high standards. He evidently
found falling stones a lot less interesting than living creatures. Yet the sheer scale of his
enterprise, unmatched in antiquity and for centuries to come, gave an authority to all his writings.
It is perhaps worth reiterating the difference between Plato and Aristotle, who agreed with each
other that the world is the product of rational design, that the philosopher investigates the form
and the universal, and that the only true knowledge is that which is irrefutable. The essential
difference between them was that Plato felt mathematical reasoning could arrive at the truth with
little outside help, but Aristotle believed detailed empirical investigations of nature were
essential if progress was to be made in understanding the natural world.

Books I used to prepare this lecture:

Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle, G. E. R. Lloyd, Norton, N.Y., 1970. An excellent
inexpensive paperback giving a more detailed presentation of many of the subjects we have
discussed. My sections on Method and Causes, in particular, follow Lloyds treatment.
History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell. An opinionated but very entertaining book,
mainly on philosophy but with a fair amount of science and social analysis.
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Measuring the Solar System

Michael Fowler UVa Physics Department
In this lecture, we shall show how the Greeks made the first real measurements of
astronomical distances: the size of the earth and the distance to the moon, both
determined quite accurately, and the distance to the sun, where their best estimate
fell short by a factor of two.

How big is the Earth?

The first reasonably good measurement of the earths size was done by
Eratosthenes, a Greek who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the third century B.C. He

knew that far to the south, in the town of Syene (present-day Aswan, where there is
now a huge dam on the Nile) there was a deep well and at midday on June 21, the
sunlight reflected off the water far down in this well, something that happened on
no other day of the year. The point was that the sun was exactly vertically overhead
at that time, and at no other time in the year. Eratosthenes also knew that the sun
was never vertically overhead in Alexandria, the closest it got was on June 21, when
it was off by an angle he found to be about 7.2 degrees, by measuring the shadow
of a vertical stick.
The distance from Alexandria to Syene was measured at 5,000 stades (a stade
being 500 feet), almost exactly due south. From this, and the difference in the angle
of sunlight at midday on June 21, Eratosthenes was able to figure out how far it
would be to go completely around the earth.

Of course, Eratosthenes fully recognized that the Earth is spherical in shape, and
that vertically downwards anywhere on the surface just means the direction
towards the center from that point. Thus two vertical sticks, one at Alexandria and
one at Syene, were not really parallel. On the other hand, the rays of sunlight falling
at the two places were parallel. Therefore, if the suns rays were parallel to a
vertical stick at Syene (so it had no shadow) the angle they made with the stick at
Alexandria was the same as how far around the Earth, in degrees, Alexandria was
from Syene.
According to the Greek historian Cleomedes, Eratosthenes measured the angle
between the sunlight and the stick at midday in midsummer in Alexandria to be 7.2
degrees, or one-fiftieth of a complete circle. It is evident on drawing a picture of this
that this is the same angle as that between Alexandria and Syene as seen from the

center of the earth, so the distance between them, the 5,000 stades, must be onefiftieth of the distance around the earth, which is therefore equal to 250,000 stades,
about 23,300 miles. The correct answer is about 25,000 miles, and in fact
Eratosthenes may have been closer than we have stated here---were not quite sure
how far a stade was, and some scholars claim it was about 520 feet, which would
put him even closer.

How High is the Moon?

How do we begin to measure the distance from the earth to the moon? One obvious
thought is to measure the angle to the moon from two cities far apart at the same
time, and construct a similar triangle, like Thales measuring the distance of the ship
at sea. Unfortunately, the angle difference from two points a few hundred miles
apart was too small to be measurable by the techniques in use at the time, so that
method wouldnt work.
Nevertheless, Greek astronomers, beginning with Aristarchus of Samos (310-230
B.C., approximately) came up with a clever method of finding the moons distance,
by careful observation of a lunar eclipse, which happens when the earth shields the
moon from the suns light.
For a Flash movie of a lunar eclipse, click here!
To better visualize a lunar eclipse, just imagine holding up a quarter (diameter one
inch approximately) at the distance where it just blocks out the suns rays from one
eye. Of course you shouldnt try this---youll damage your eye! You can try it with
the full moon, which happens to be the same apparent size in the sky as the sun. It
turns out that the right distance is about nine feet away, or 108 inches. If the
quarter is further away than that, it is not big enough to block out all the sunlight. If
it is closer than 108 inches, it will totally block the sunlight from some small circular
area, which gradually increases in size moving towards the quarter. Thus the part of
space where the sunlight is totally blocked is conical, like a long slowly tapering
icecream cone, with the point 108 inches behind the quarter. Of course, this is
surrounded by a fuzzier area, called the penumbra, where the sunlight is partially
blocked. The fully shaded area is called the umbra. (This is Latin for shadow.
Umbrella means little shadow in Italian.) If you tape a quarter to the end of a thin
stick, and hold it in the sun appropriately, you can see these different shadow areas.
Question: If you used a dime instead of a quarter, how far from your eye would you
have to hold it to just block the full moonlight from that eye? How do the different
distances relate to the relative sizes of the dime and the quarter? Draw a diagram
showing the two conical shadows.

Now imagine youre out in space, some distance from the earth, looking at the
earths shadow. (Of course, you could only really see it if you shot out a cloud of tiny
particles and watched which of them glistened in the sunlight, and which were in
the dark.) Clearly, the earths shadow must be conical, just like that from the
quarter. And it must also be similar to the quarters in the technical sense---it must
be 108 earth diameters long! That is because the point of the cone is the furthest
point at which the earth can block all the sunlight, and the ratio of that distance to
the diameter is determined by the angular size of the sun being blocked. This
means the cone is 108 earth diameters long, the far point 864,000 miles from earth.

Now, during a total lunar eclipse the moon moves into this cone of darkness. Even
when the moon is completely inside the shadow, it can still be dimly seen, because
of light scattered by the earths atmosphere. By observing the moon carefully
during the eclipse, and seeing how the earths shadow fell on it, the Greeks found
that the diameter of the earths conical shadow at the distance of the moon was
about two-and-a-half times the moons own diameter.
Note: It is possible to check this estimate either from a photograph of the moon
entering the earths shadow, or, better, by actual observation of a lunar eclipse.
Question: At this point the Greeks knew the size of the earth (approximately a
sphere 8,000 miles in diameter) and therefore the size of the earths conical
shadow (length 108 times 8,000 miles). They knew that when the moon passed

through the shadow, the shadow diameter at that distance was two and a half times
the moons diameter. Was that enough information to figure out how far away the
moon was?
Well, it did tell them the moon was no further away than 108x8,000 = 864,000
miles, otherwise the moon wouldnt pass through the earths shadow at all! But
from what weve said so far, it could be a tiny moon almost 864,000 miles away,
passing through that last bit of shadow near the point. However, such a tiny moon
could never cause a solar eclipse. In fact, as the Greeks well knew, the moon is the
same apparent size in the sky as the sun. This is the crucial extra fact they used to
nail down the moons distance from earth.
They solved the problem using geometry, constructing the figure below. In this
figure, the fact that the moon and the sun have the same apparent size in the sky
means that the angle ECD is the same as the angle EAF. Notice now that the length
FE is the diameter of the earths shadow at the distance of the moon, and the
length ED is the diameter of the moon. The Greeks found by observation of the
lunar eclipse that the ratio of FE to ED was 2.5 to 1, so looking at the similar
isosceles triangles FAE and DCE, we deduce that AE is 2.5 times as long as EC, from
which AC is 3.5 times as long as EC. But they knew that AC must be 108 earth
diameters in length, and taking the earths diameter to be 8,000 miles, the furthest
point of the conical shadow, A, is 864,000 miles from earth. From the above
argument, this is 3.5 times further away than the moon is, so the distance to the
moon is 864,000/3.5 miles, about 240,000 miles. This is within a few percent of the
right figure. The biggest source of error is likely the estimate of the ratio of the
moons size to that of the earths shadow as it passes through.

How far away is the Sun?

This was an even more difficult question the Greek astronomers asked themselves,
and they didnt do so well. They did come up with a very ingenious method to
measure the suns distance, but it proved too demanding in that they could not
measure the important angle accurately enough. Still, they did learn from this
approach that the sun was much further away than the moon, and consequently,
since it has the same apparent size, it must be much bigger than either the moon or
the earth.
Their idea for measuring the suns distance was very simple in principle. They knew,
of course, that the moon shone by reflecting the suns light. Therefore, they
reasoned, when the moon appears to be exactly half full, the line from the moon to
the sun must be exactly perpendicular to the line from the moon to the observer
(see the figure to convince yourself of this). So, if an observer on earth, on
observing a half moon in daylight, measures carefully the angle between the
direction of the moon and the direction of the sun, the angle in the figure, he

should be able to construct a long thin triangle, with its baseline the earth-moon
line, having an angle of 90 degrees at one end and at the other, and so find the
ratio of the suns distance to the moons distance.

The problem with this approach is that the angle turns out to differ from 90
degrees by about a sixth of a degree, too small to measure accurately. The first
attempt was by Aristarchus, who estimated the angle to be 3 degrees. This would
put the sun only five million miles away. However, it would already suggest the sun
to be much larger than the earth. It was probably this realization that led
Aristarchus to suggest that the sun, rather than the earth, was at the center of the
universe. The best later Greek attempts found the suns distance to be about half
the correct value (92 million miles).

The presentation here is similar to that in Eric Rogers, Physics for the Inquiring Mind,
Princeton, 1960.
Some exercises related to this material are presented in my notes for Physics 621.
Copyright Michael Fowler 1996, 2007 except where otherwise noted.
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Greek Science after Aristotle

Michael Fowler UVa Physics

Strato
As we mentioned before, Aristotles analysis of motion was criticized by Strato (who died
around 268 B.C., he is sometimes called Straton), known as the Physicist who was the third
director of the Lyceum after Aristotle (the founder) and Theophrastus, who was mainly a
botanist.
Stratos career was curiously parallel to Aristotles. Recall Aristotle spent twenty years at Platos
academy before going to Macedonia to be tutor to Alexander, after which Aristotle came back to
Athens to found his own university, the Lyceum. A few years later, Alexander conquered most
of the known world, dividing it into regions with his old friends in charge. In particular, he had
his boyhood friend Ptolemy in charge of Egypt, where Alexander founded the new city of
Alexandria. Now Strato, after a period of study at the Lyceum, was hired by Ptolemy to tutor his
son Ptolemy II Philadelphus (as he became known) in Alexandria. Subsequently Strato returned
to Athens where he was in charge of the Lyceum for almost twenty years, until his death.
Strato, like Aristotle, believed in close observation of natural phenomena, but in our particular
field of interest here, the study of motion, he observed much more carefully than Aristotle, and
realized that falling bodies usually accelerate. He made two important points: rainwater pouring
off a corner of a roof is clearly moving faster when it hits the ground than it was when it left the
roof, because a continuous stream can be seen to break into drops which then become spread
further apart as they fall towards the ground. His second point was that if you drop something to
the ground, it lands with a bigger thud if you drop it from a greater height: compare, say, a three
foot drop with a one inch drop. One is forced to conclude that falling objects do not usually reach
some final speed in a very short time and then fall steadily, which was Aristotles picture. Had
this line of investigation been pursued further at the Lyceum, we might have saved a thousand
years or more, but after Strato the Lyceum concentrated its efforts on literary criticism.

Aristarchus
Strato did, however, have one very famous pupil, Aristarchus of Samos (310 - 230 B.C.).
Aristarchus claimed that the earth rotated on its axis every twenty-four hours and also went
round the sun once a year, and that the other planets all move in orbits around the sun. In other
words, he anticipated Copernicus in all essentials. In fact, Copernicus at first acknowledged
Aristarchus, but later didnt mention him (see Penguin Dictionary of Ancient History).
Aristarchus claims were not generally accepted, and in fact some thought he should be indicted

on a charge of impiety for suggesting that the earth, thought to be the fixed center of the
universe, was in motion (Bertrand Russell, quoting Plutarch about Cleanthes). The other
astronomers didnt believe Aristarchus theory for different reasons. It was known that the
distance to the sun was in excess of one million miles (Aristarchus himself estimated one and a
half million miles, which is far too low) and they thought that if the earth is going around in a
circle that big, the pattern of stars in the sky would vary noticeably throughout the year, because
the closer ones would appear to move to some extent against the background of the ones further
away. Aristarchus responded that they are all so far away that a million miles or two difference in
the point of observation is negligible. This implied, though, the universe was really hugeat
least billions of miles acrosswhich few were ready to believe.

Euclid
Although the Ptolemies were not exactly nice people, they did a great deal of good for Greek
civilization, especially the sciences and mathematics. In their anxiety to prove how cultured and
powerful they were, they had constructed a massive museum and a library at Alexandria, a city
which grew to half a million people by 200 B.C. It was here that Erastosthenes (275 - 195 B.C.)
was librarian, but somewhat earlier Euclid taught mathematics there, about 295 B.C. during the
reign of Ptolemy I. His great work is his Elements, setting out all of Greek geometry as a logical
development from basic axioms in twelve volumes. This is certainly one of the greatest books
ever written, but not an easy read.
In fact, Ptolemy I, realizing that geometry was an important part of Greek thought, suggested to
Euclid that he would like to get up to speed in the subject, but, being a king, could not put in a
great deal of effort. Euclid responded: There is no Royal Road to geometry.
Euclid shared Platos contempt for the practical. When one of his pupils asked what was in it for
him to learn geometry, Euclid called a slave and said Give this young man fifty cents, since he
must needs make a gain out of what he learns.
The Romans, who took over later on didnt appreciate Euclid. There is no record of a translation
of the Elements into Latin until 480 A.D. But the Arabs were more perceptive. A copy was given
to the Caliph by the Byzantine emperor in A.D. 760, and the first Latin translation that still
survives was actually made from the Arabic in Bath, England, in 1120. From that point on, the
study of geometry grew again in the West, thanks to the Arabs.

Plato, Aristotle and Christianity

It is interesting to note that it was in Alexandria that the first crucial connection between classical
Greek philosophy and Christian thought was made. As we have just seen, Alexandria was a
major center of Greek thought, and also had a very large Jewish community, which had self-

governing privileges. Many Jews never returned to Palestine after the Babylonian captivity, but
became traders in the cities around the eastern Mediterranean, and Alexandria was a center of
this trade. Thus Alexandria was a melting-pot of ideas and philosophies from these different
sources. In particular, St. Clement (A.D. 150-215) and Origen were Greek Christians living in
Alexandria who helped develop Christian theology and incorporated many of the ideas of Plato
and Aristotle.
(Actually, this St. Clement was demoted from the Roman martyrology in the ninth century for
supposed hereticism (but Isaac Newton admired him!). There is a St. Clement of Rome, who
lived in the first century. See the Columbia Encyclopedia.) Recall that St. Paul himself was a
Greek speaking Jew, and his epistles were written in Greek to Greek cities, like Ephesus near
Miletus, Phillipi and Thessalonica on the Aegean, and Corinth between Athens and Sparta. After
St. Paul, then, many of the early Christian fathers were Greek, and it is hardly surprising that as
the faith developed in Alexandria and elsewhere it included Greek ideas. This Greek influence
had of course been long forgotten in the middle ages. Consequently, when monks began to look
at the works of Plato and Aristotle at the dawn of the Renaissance, they were amazed to find how
these pre-Christian heathens had anticipated so many of the ideas found in Christian theology. (A
History of Science, W. C. Dampier, end of Chapter 1.)
The most famous Alexandrian astronomer, Ptolemy, lived from about 100 AD to 170 AD. He is
not to be confused with all the Ptolemies who were the rulers! We will discuss Ptolemy later, in
comparing his scheme for the solar system with that of Copernicus.
There were two other great mathematicians of this period that we must mention: Archimedes and
Apollonius.

Archimedes
Archimedes, 287 - 212 B.C., lived at Syracuse in Sicily, but also studied in Alexandria. He
contributed many new results to mathematics, including successfully computing areas and
volumes of two and three dimensional figures with techniques that amounted to calculus for the
cases he studied. He calculated pi by finding the perimeter of a sequence of regular polygons
inscribed and escribed about a circle.
Two of his major contributions to physics are his understanding of the principle of buoyancy, and
his analysis of the lever. He also invented many ingenious technological devices, many for war,
but also the Archimedean screw, a pumping device for irrigation systems.

Archimedes Principle
We turn now to Syracuse, Sicily, 2200 years ago, with Archimedes and his friend king Heiro. The
following is quoted from Vitruvius, a Roman historian writing just before the time of Christ:

Heiro, after gaining the royal power in Syracuse, resolved, as a consequence of his successful
exploits, to place in a certain temple a golden crown which he had vowed to the immortal gods.
He contracted for its making at a fixed price and weighed out a precise amount of gold to the
contractor. At the appointed time the latter delivered to the kings satisfaction an exquisitely
finished piece of handiwork, and it appeared that in weight the crown corresponded precisely to
what the gold had weighed.
But afterwards a charge was made that gold had been abstracted and an equivalent weight of
silver had been added in the manufacture of the crown. Heiro, thinking it an outrage that he had
been tricked, and yet not knowing how to detect the theft, requested Archimedes to consider the
matter. The latter, while the case was still on his mind, happened to go to the bath, and on
getting into a tub observed that the more his body sank into it the more water ran out over the
tub. As this pointed out the way to explain the case in question, without a moments delay and
transported with joy, he jumped out of the tub and rushed home naked, crying in a loud voice
that he had found what he was seeking; for as he ran he shouted repeatedly in Greek, Eureka,
Eureka.
Taking this as the beginning of his discovery, it is said that he made two masses of the same
weight as the crown, one of gold and the other of silver. After making them, he filled a large
vessel with water to the very brim and dropped the mass of silver into it. As much water ran out
as was equal in bulk to that of the silver sunk in the vessel. Then, taking out the mass, he poured
back the lost quantity of water, using a pint measure, until it was level with the brim as it had
been before. Thus he found the weight of silver corresponding to a definite quantity of water.
After this experiment, he likewise dropped the mass of gold into the full vessel and, on taking it
out and measuring as before, found that not so much water was lost, but a smaller quantity:
namely, as much less as a mass of gold lacks in bulk compared to a mass of silver of the same
weight. Finally, filling the vessel again and dropping the crown itself into the same quantity of
water, he found that more water ran over for the crown than for the mass of gold of the same
weight. Hence, reasoning from the fact that more water was lost in the case of the crown than in
that of the mass, he detected the mixing of silver with the gold and made the theft of the
contractor perfectly clear.
What is going on here is simply a measurement of the densitythe mass per unit volumeof
silver, gold and the crown. To measure the masses some kind of scale is used, note that at the
beginning a precise amount of gold is weighed out to the contractor. Of course, if you had a nice
rectangular brick of gold, and knew its weight, you wouldnt need to mess with water to
determine its density, you could just figure out its volume by multiplying together length, breadth
and height, and divide the mass, or weight, by the volume to find the density in, say, pounds per
cubic foot or whatever units are convenient. (Actually, the units most often used are the metric
ones, grams per cubic centimeter. These have the nice feature that water has a density of 1,

because thats how the gram was defined. In these units, silver has a density of 10.5, and gold of
19.3. To go from these units to pounds per cubic foot, we would multiply by the weight in
pounds of a cubic foot of water, which is 62.)
The problem with just trying to find the density by figuring out the volume of the crown is that it
is a very complicated shape, and although one could no doubt find its volume by measuring each
tiny piece and calculating a lot of small volumes which are then added together, it would take a
long time and be hard to be sure of the accuracy, whereas lowering the crown into a filled bucket
of water and measuring how much water overflows is obviously a pretty simple procedure. (You
do have to allow for the volume of the string!). Anyway, the bottom line is that if the crown
displaces more water than a block of gold of the same weight, the crown isnt pure gold.
Actually, there is one slightly surprising aspect of the story as recounted above by Vitruvius.
Note that they had a weighing scale available, and a bucket suitable for immersing the crown.
Given these, there was really no need to measure the amount of water slopping over. All that was
necessary was first, to weigh the crown when it was fully immersed in the water, then, second, to
dry it off and weigh it out of the water. The difference in these two weighings is just the
buoyancy support force from the water. Archimedes Principle states that the buoyancy support
force is exactly equal to the weight of the water displaced by the crown, that is, it is equal to the
weight of a volume of water equal to the volume of the crown.
This is definitely a less messy procedurethere is no need to fill the bucket to the brim in the
first place, all that is necessary is to be sure that the crown is fully immersed, and not resting on
the bottom or caught on the side of the bucket, during the weighing.
Of course, maybe Archimedes had not figured out his Principle when the king began to worry
about the crown, perhaps the above experiment led him to it. There seems to be some confusion
on this point of history.

Archimedes and Leverage

Although we know that leverage had been used to move heavy objects since prehistoric times, it
appears that Archimedes was the first person to appreciate just how much weight could be
shifted by one person using appropriate leverage.
Archimedes illustrated the principle of the lever very graphically to his friend the king, by
declaring that if there were another world, and he could go to it, he could move this one. To
quote from Plutarch,
Heiro was astonished, and begged him to put his proposition into execution, and show him some
great weight moved by a slight force. Archimedes therefore fixed upon a three-masted
merchantman of the royal fleet, which had been dragged ashore by the great labours of many

men, and after putting on board many passengers and the customary freight, he seated himself at
some distance from her, and without any great effort, but quietly setting in motion a system of
compound pulleys, drew her towards him smoothly and evenly, as though she were gliding
through the water.
Just in case you thought kings might have been different 2200 years ago, read on:
Amazed at this, then, and comprehending the power of his art, the king persuaded Archimedes to
prepare for him offensive and defensive weapons to be used in every kind of siege warfare.
This turned out to be a very smart move on the kings part, since some time later, in 215 B.C., the
Romans attacked Syracuse. To quote from Plutarchs Life of Marcellus (the Roman general):
When, therefore, the Romans assaulted them by sea and land, the Syracusans were stricken dumb
with terror; they thought that nothing could withstand so furious an onslaught by such forces.
But Archimedes began to ply his engines, and shot against the land forces of the assailants all
sorts of missiles and immense masses of stones, which came down with incredible din and speed;
nothing whatever could ward off their weight, but they knocked down in heaps those who stood
in their way, and threw their ranks into confusion. At the same time huge beams were suddenly
projected over the ships from the walls, which sank some of them with great weights plunging
down from on high; others were seized at the prow by iron claws, or beaks like the beaks of
cranes, drawn straight up into the air, and then plunged stern foremost into the depths, or were
turned round and round by means of enginery within the city, and dashed upon the steep cliffs
that jutted out beneath the wall of the city, with great destruction of the fighting men on board,
who perished in the wrecks. Frequently, too, a ship would be lifted out of the water into mid-air,
whirled hither and thither as it hung there, a dreadful spectacle, until its crew had been thrown
out and hurled in all directions, when it would fall empty upon the walls, or slip away from the
clutch that had held it... .
Then, in a council of war, it was decided to come up under the walls while it was still night, if
they could; for the ropes which Archimedes used in his engines, since they imported great
impetus to the missiles cast, would, they thought, send them flying over their heads, but would be
ineffective at close quarters, since there was no space for the cast. Archimedes, however, as it
seemed, had long before prepared for such an emergency engines with a range adapted to any
interval and missiles of short flight, and, through many small and contiguous openings in the
wall, short-range engines called scorpions could be brought to bear on objects close at hand
without being seen by the enemy.
When, therefore, the Romans came up under the walls, thinking themselves unnoticed, once more
they encountered a great storm of missiles; huge stones came tumbling down upon them almost
perpendicularly, and the wall shot out arrows at them from every point; they therefore retired.... .

At last, the Romans became so fearful that, whenever they saw a bit of rope or a stick of timber
projecting a little over the wall, There it is, they cried, Archimedes is training some engine
upon us, and turned their backs and fled. Seeing this, Marcellus desisted from all fighting and
assault, and thenceforth depended on a long siege.
It is sad to report that the long siege was successful and a Roman soldier killed Archimedes as he
was drawing geometric figures in the sand, in 212 B.C. Marcellus had given orders that
Archimedes was not to be killed, but somehow the orders didnt get through.

Apollonius
Apollonius probably did most of his work at Alexandria, and lived around 220 B.C., but his exact
dates have been lost. He greatly extended the study of conic sections, the ellipse, parabola and
hyperbola.
As we shall find later in the course, the conic sections play a central role in our understanding of
everything from projectiles to planets, and both Galileo and Newton, among many others,
acknowledge the importance of Apollonius work. This is not, however, a geometry course, so
we will not survey his results here, but, following Galileo, rederive the few we need when we
need them.

Hypatia
The last really good astronomer and mathematician in Greek Alexandria was a woman, Hypatia,
born in 370 AD the daughter of an astronomer and mathematician Theon, who worked at the
museum. She wrote a popularization of Apollonius work on conics. She became enmeshed in
politics, and, as a pagan who lectured on neoplatonism to pagans, Jews and Christians (who by
now had separate schools) she was well known. In 412 Cyril became patriarch. He was a
fanatical Christian, and became hostile to Orestes, the Roman prefect of Egypt, a former student
and a friend of Hypatia. In March 415, Hypatia was killed by a mob of fanatical Christian monks
in particularly horrible fashion. The details can be found in the book Hypatias Heritage (see
below).
Books I used in preparing this lecture:
Greek Science after Aristotle, G. E. R. Lloyd, Norton, N.Y., 1973
A Source Book in Greek Science, M. R. Cohen and I. E. Drabkin, Harvard, 1966
Hypatias Heritage: A History of Women in Science, Margaret Alic, The Womens Press, London
1986

A History of Science, W. C. Dampier, Cambridge, 1929

Copyright except where otherwise noted 1995 Michael Fowler
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Basic Ideas in Greek Mathematics

Michael Fowler UVa Physics Department

Closing in on the Square Root of 2

In our earlier discussion of the irrationality of the square root of 2, we presented a list of squares
of the first 17 integers, and remarked that there were several near misses to solutions of the
equation m2 = 2n2. Specifically, 32 = 222 + 1, 72 = 252 - 1, 172 = 2122 + 1. These results were
also noted by the Greeks, and set down in tabular form as follows:
3

17

12

After staring at this pattern of numbers for a while, the pattern emerges: 3 + 2 = 5 and 7 + 5 = 12,
so the number in the right-hand column, after the first row, is the sum of the two numbers in the
row above. Furthermore, 2 + 5 = 7 and 5 + 12 = 17, so the number in the left-hand column is the
sum of the number to its right and the number immediately above that one.
The question is: does this pattern continue? To find out, we use it to find the next pair. The right
hand number should be 17 + 12 = 29, the left-hand 29 + 12 = 41. Now 412 = 1681, and 292 =
841, so 412 = 2 292 - 1. Repeating the process gives 41 + 29 = 70 and 70 + 29 = 99. It is easy to
check that 992 = 2702 + 1. So 992/702 = 2 + 1/702. In other words, the difference between the

square root of 2 and the rational number 99/70 is approximately of the magnitude 1/702. (You can
check this with your calculator).
The complete pattern is now evident. The recipe for the numbers is given above, and the +1s
and -1s alternate on the right hand side. In fact, the Greeks managed to prove (it can be done
with elementary algebra) that pairs of numbers can be added indefinitely, and their ratio gives a
better and better approximation to the square root of 2.
The essential discovery here is that, although it is established that the square root of 2 is not a
rational number, we can by the recipe find a rational number as close as you like to the square
root of two. This is sometimes expressed as there are rational numbers infinitely close to the
square root of 2 but thats not really a helpful way of putting it. Its better to think of a sort of
game - you name a small number, say, one millionth, and I can find a rational number (using the
table above and finding the next few sets of numbers) which is within one millionth of the square
root of 2. However small a number you name, I can use the recipe above to find a rational that
close to the square root of 2. Of course, it may take a lifetime, but the method is clear!

Zenos Paradoxes
Zeno of Elea (495-435 BC) is said to have been a self-taught country boy. He was a friend of a
well-known philosopher, Parmenides, and visited Athens with him, where he perplexed Socrates,
among others, with a set of paradoxes. (Plato gives an account of this in Parmenides.) We shall
look at two of them here.

Achilles and the Tortoise.

A two hundred yard race is set up between Achilles, who can run at 10 yards per second, and the
tortoise, who can run at one yard per second (perhaps rather fast for a tortoise, but Im trying to
keep the numbers simple).
To give the tortoise a chance, he is given a one-hundred yard start.
Now, when Achilles has covered that first 100 yards, to get to where the tortoise was, the tortoise
is 10 yards ahead.
When Achilles has covered that 10 yards, the tortoise is 1 yard ahead.
When Achilles has covered that 1 yard, the tortoise is 1/10 yard ahead.
Now, Zeno says, there is no end to this sequence! We can go on forever dividing by 10! So, Zeno
concludes, Achilles has to cover an infinite number of smaller and smaller intervals before he

catches the tortoise. But to do an infinite number of things takes an infinitely long time - so hell
never catch up.
What is wrong with this argument? Try to think it through before you read on!
The essential point becomes clearer if you figure out how long it takes Achilles to cover the
sequence of smaller and smaller intervals. He takes 10 seconds to cover the first 100 yards, 1
second to cover the next 10 yards, 1/10 second for the next yard, 1/100 second for the next 1/10
of a yard, and so on. If we write down running totals of time elapsed to each of these points we
get 10 seconds, 11 seconds, 11.1 seconds, 11.11 seconds and so on. It is apparent that the total
time elapsed for all the infinite number of smaller and smaller intervals is going to be
11.1111111, with the 1s going on forever. But this recurring decimal, 0.111111 is just 1/9,
as you can easily check.
The essential point is that it is possible to add together an infinite number of time intervals and
still get a finite result. That means there is a definite time-11 1/9 seconds-at which Achilles
catches up with the tortoise, and after that instant, hes passed the tortoise.

The Arrow
Consider the flight of an arrow through the air. Let us divide time up into instants, where an
instant is an indivisibly small time. Now, during an instant, the arrow cant move at all, because
if it did, we could divide up the instant using the changing position of the arrow to indicate
which bit of the instant we are in.
However, a finite length of time-like a second-is made up of instants. Therefore, if the arrow
doesnt move at all during an instant, it doesnt move in a sum of instants. Hence, it cant move
in one second!
Whats wrong with this argument?
Now there certainly is such a thing as an instant of time: for example, if the arrow is in the air
from time zero to time two seconds, say, then there is one instant at which it has been in the air
for exactly one second.
The catch is, there is no way to divide time up into such instants. Imagine the time from zero to
two seconds represented by a geometric line two inches long on a piece of paper. By geometric, I
mean an ideal line, not one thats really a collection of microscopic bits of pencil lead, but a true
continuous line of the kind the Greeks imagined. Time has that kind of continuity-there arent
little gaps in time (at least, none weve found so far). Now try to imagine the line made up of
instants. You could start by putting dots every millionth of a second, say. But then you could
imagine putting a million dots between each of those pairs of dots, to have a dot every trillionth

of a second. And why stop there? You could keep on indefinitely with this division. But if you
spend the rest of your life on this mental exercise, you will never put a dot at the instant
corresponding to the time being the square root of two! And it has been proved by the
mathematicians that there are infinitely more irrational numbers than there are rational numbers.
So there really is no way to divide time up into instants. If youre still not sure, think about the
following problem: whats the next instant after the instant at time equals one second?

Instants and Intervals

On the other hand, it is obviously useful in analyzing the motion of the arrow to look at the
motion one bit at a time-in other words, to divide the time up somehow, to get a grip on how the
arrows speed may be varying throughout the flight. So how should we proceed? Zenos dividing
of time into instants was not very easy to understand, as weve seen. Its much easier to visualize
dividing time into intervals. For example, the two seconds the arrow is in the air could be
divided into two hundred intervals, each of length one-hundredth of a second. Then we could
find its average speed in each of those intervals by measuring how far it went in the onehundredth of a second, and multiplying by one hundred. That is, if it went two feet in the onehundredth of a second interval, it was traveling at two hundred feet per second during that
interval. (Of course, it might not be going at that speed for the whole flight-thats why weve
divided it into intervals, so that we can monitor the speed the whole time). Of course, if the
arrow hits something, it will slow down very rapidly-there will be a big change in speed in one
hundredth of a second. If we want to describe the motion of the arrow in this situation, we must
divide time up into smaller intervals, say thousandths of a second, or even ten-thousandths of a
second, depending on how precisely we want to follow the change in speed.

Speed at an Instant
There is still a problem here we havent quite faced. All this dividing time up into small intervals
and finding the average speed in each interval gives a pretty good idea of the arrows progress,
but its still a reasonable question to ask: just what is the arrows speed at the instant one second
after the flight began?
How do we answer that question? Think about it before you read on.
The essential point about speed is that it is a rate of change of position-this is obvious when you
think about measuring speed, its in units like miles per hour, feet per second, etc. This implies
that to make any statement about speed we have to say how far the arrow moved between two
specified times. Therefore, to find the speed at the time one second after takeoff, we would need
to find where the arrow is at, say, 0.995 seconds after takeoff, then at 1.005 seconds after takeoff.

Ive chosen here two times that are one-hundredth of a second apart. If the arrow moves one and
a half feet during that period, its going at 150 feet per second.
You might object, though, that this is still not very precise. Probably 150 feet per second is pretty
close to the arrows speed at one second after takeoff, but its really an average over a time
interval of one-hundredth of a second, so may not be exactly the speed in the middle of the time.
This is true-it may not be. What we must do, at least in principle, is to take a smaller time
interval, say one-millionth of a second, again centered at time one second, as before. We now
measure how far the arrow moves in the one-millionth of a second, and multiply that distance by
one million to get the arrows average speed over that very short time.
Of course, you could say youre still not satisfied. You want to know the precise speed at the one
second mark, not some approximation based on the average over a time interval. But, as weve
just said, all speed measurements necessarily involve some time interval, which, however, can be
as short as we like. This suggests how we should define what we mean by the speed at one
instant of time-we take a sequence of shorter and shorter time intervals, each one centered at the
time in question, and find the average speed in each. This series of speed measurements will
close in on the exact speed at the time one second.
This should remind you of the discussion of the square root of two. There we had a sequence of
rational numbers such that if you come up with some small number such as a millionth of a
trillionth, we could always find a rational within that distance of root two. Here we are saying
that if you want the speed to some preassigned accuracy, we can find it by taking a sufficiently
small time interval around the time in question, and computing the average speed in that interval.
Actually, this may not be as difficult as it sounds. For example, imagine an arrow moving far out
in space at a steady speed, with no air resistance or gravity to contend with. Then it will go at a
steady speed, and the average speed over all time intervals will be the same. This means we can
find (in principle) the exact speed at any given time without having to worry about indefinitely
small time intervals. Another fairly simple case is an arrow gaining speed at a steady rate. Its
speed in the middle of a time interval turns out to be exactly equal to its average speed in the
interval. We shall be discussing this case further when we get to Galileo.

The Beginning of Calculus

We should emphasize that the above discussion of intervals, instants and so on was not the
response of the Athenians to Zeno. Only with later work by Eudoxus, Euclid and Archimedes did
the way to deal with these small quantities gradually become apparent. Zenos contribution was
that he initiated the discussion that ultimately led to the calculus. In fact, according to Bertrand
Russell (History of Western Philosophy) Zeno taught Socrates the Socratic method-the method of
seeking knowledge by systematic question and answer. Unhappily, Zenos approach did not win

him powerful friends, and he finally lost his head for treason or something of the sort (Bell,
Men of Mathematics).

Archimedes Begins Calculating Pi

Both the Babylonians and the Egyptians used approximations to pi, the ratio of the
circumference of a circle to its diameter. The Egyptians used a value 3.16, within one per cent of
the true value. (Further details can be found in Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity,
Dover, page 78.) Actually, this value follows from their rule for the area of a circle, (8/9.d)2, but
it is reasonable to suppose they could have constructed a circle and measured the circumference
to this accuracy. There are no indications that they tried to calculate pi, using geometric
arguments as Archimedes did.

Following Archimedes, we first draw a circle of radius

equal to one (so the diameter is 2), and inscribe in it a
regular (that is, all sides of equal length) hexagon. It is
evident that the hexagon is made up of six equilateral
triangles, since the 360 degree angle at the center of the
circle is equally divided into six, and the angles of a
triangle add to 180 degrees. Therefore, each side of
each triangle is equal to the radius of the circle, that is,
equal to one. Thus the perimeter of the hexagon is
exactly 6. It is clear from the figure that the
circumference of the circle, the total distance around, is greater than the perimeter of the
hexagon, because the hexagon can be seen as a series of shortcuts on going around the circle. We
conclude that pi, the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter, is greater than 3, but
not much-the hexagon looks quite close. (For example, much closer than, going around a square
boxed around the circle, which would be a distance of 8 radii. If we approximated the
circumference of the circle by this square, we would guess pi = 4.)
So the first step-comparing the circle with the hexagon-tells us that pi is greater than three.
Archimedes next move was to find a polygon inscribed in the circle that was closer to the circle
than the hexagon, so that its perimeter would be closer to the circumference of the circle. His
strategy was to double the number of sides of the polygon, that is, to replace the hexagon by a
twelve-sided regular polygon, a dodecagon. Obviously, from the figure, the perimeter of the
dodecagon is much closer to that of the circle than the hexagon was (but its still obviously less,
since, like the hexagon, it is a series of shortcuts on going around the circle).

Calculating the perimeter of the dodecagon is

not as simple as it was for the hexagon, but all it
require is Pythagoras theorem. Look at the
figure. We need to find the length of one side,
like AB, and multiply it by 12 to get the total
perimeter. AB is the hypotenuse of the rightangled triangle ABD. We know the length AD is
just (recall the radius of the circle = 1). We
dont know the other length, BD, but we do
know that BC must equal 1, because its just the
radius of the circle again. Switching our
attention to the right-angled triangle ACD, we
see its hypotenuse equals 1, and one side (AD)
equals . So from Pythagoras, the square of CD
must be . We will write CD = sqrt3.
Having found CD, we can find DB since CD + DB = CB = 1, that is, DB = 1 - sqrt3. So we
know the two shorter sides of the right-angled triangle ADB, and we can find the hypotenuse
using Pythagoras again.
The dodecagon turns out to have a perimeter 6.21, giving pi greater than 3.1. This is not quite as
close as the Egyptians, but Archimedes didnt stop here. He next went to a 24-sided regular
polygon inscribed in the circle. Again, he just needed to apply Pythagoras theorem twice,
exactly as in the preceding step. The perimeter of the 24-sided regular polygon turns out to be
6.26, giving pi greater than 3.13. (We are giving a slightly sloppy version of his work: he always
worked with rationals, and where the square root of 3 came in, he used 265/153 < sqrt3 <
1351/780. These limits came from an algorithm originating with the Babylonians. For further
information, click here.)
In fact, Archimedes went on as far as the 96-sided regular polygon inscribed in the circle. He
then started all over again with regular polygons circumscribed about the circle, so that the circle
is touching the middle of each side of the polygon, and is completely contained by it. Such a
polygon clearly has a perimeter greater than that of the circle, but getting closer to it as we
consider polygons with more and more sides. Archimedes considered such a polygon with 96
sides.
So, with a series of polygons inside the circle, and another series outside it, he managed to
bracket the length of the circumference between two sets of numbers which gradually
approached each other. This is again reminiscent of the Greek strategy in approximating the
square root of 2. The result of all his efforts was the inequality: 3 10/71 < pi < 3 1/7. If we take
the average of these two numbers, we find 3.14185. The correct value is 3.14159 .

Squaring the Circle

This phrase refers to the famous problem of finding an area with straight-line boundaries equal in
area to a circle of given diameter. Archimedes proved that the area of a circle is equal to that of a
right-angled triangle having the two shorter sides equal to the radius of the circle and its
circumference respectively.

The idea of his proof is as follows. Consider first a square

inscribed in the circle. The square is made up of four
triangles, each of height h, say, and base length b.
(Actually, b = 2h, but well keep them separate.) The total
area of the square is equal to the total area of the 4
triangles, which is 4 times hb, or h4b. Notice
that this is the area of a long thin triangle, with height
equal to the distance h from the middle of the side of the
square to the center of the circle, and base equal to the
perimeter length 4b of the square.

The area of the square isnt a very

good approximation to that of the
circle, but we can improve it by
replacing the square by a regular
octagon, with all its points on the
circle. Now, this octagon can by divided into eight triangles, following the same procedure as for
the square. The height of each of these triangles equals the distance from the center of the circle
to the middle of one side of the octagon. Just as for the square case, the total area of these eight
triangles is equal to that of a long thin triangle of the same height, and with base length equal to
the perimeter of the octagon.
It is evident that the height of the octagons triangles is closer to the radius of the circle than the
height of the squares triangles, and the perimeter of the octagon is closer to the circumference of
the circle than the perimeter of the square was.
The process is repeated: the octagon is replaced by a regular 16-sided polygon, with all its points
on the circle. This polygon is equal in area to the sum of the 16 triangles formed by drawing lines
from the center of the circle to its points. These triangles all have the same height, so they have
total area the same as a long thin triangle having the same height, and base length equal to the
perimeter of the 16-sided polygon.

At this point, the pattern should be clear-as we go to polygons of 32, 64, sides, the total area
of the polygon is the same as that of a right angled triangle with a long side equal to the
perimeter of the polygon, which approaches the circumference of the circle as the polygons have
more and more sides, and the height of the triangle approaches the radius of the circle. Therefore,
the area of the polygons approaches baseheight = 2pirr = pir2.

Eudoxus Method of Exhaustion

This section and the next are optionalthey wont appear on any tests, etc. I just
put them in for completeness.

In fact, the account given above doesnt do justice to the tightness of the Greeks geometric
arguments. The approach to the limit of more and more sided polygons approximating the circle
better and better is a bit vague. Its not very clear how quickly this is happening.
Eudoxus clarified the situation by giving a
procedure putting a lower limit on how much
more of the circles total area was covered by
the new polygon created at each step. Lets
begin with the square. In the figure, we show
the inscribed square EFGH, and also a
circumscribed square ABCD. Clearly, the area
of square EFGH is exactly half of that of
square ABCD. Since the circle lies entirely
inside ABCD, it follows that EFGH covers
more than half of the area of the circle.

Now consider how much more of the circles

total area is covered when we go from the
square to the octagon. We add triangular areas
like EPF to each side of the square. Now,
notice that the triangle EPF has area exactly half of the rectangular area ELKF. If we had added
rectangular areas like that to the four sides of the square, the circles area would have been
completely contained. This implies that by adding just the triangles, that is, going from the
square to the octagon, we are covering more than half of the area of the circle that lay outside the
square.
This same argument works at each step: so, the inscribed square covers more than half the
circles area, going to the octagon covers more than half the rest, so the octagon covers more

than three-quarters of the circles area, the 16-sided inscribed polygon covers more than seveneighths of the circles area, and so on.
Archimedes used Eudoxus approach to prove that the area of a circle was equal to that of the
right-angled triangle with shorter sides equal to the radius and the circumference of the circle.
Suppose, he said, that the triangles area is less than the circles. Then in the sequence of
polygons with 4, 8, 16, 32, sides, we will get to one with area greater than the triangles. But
that polygon will have an area equal to that of a number of triangles equal to its number of sides,
and, as weve argued above, the sum of their areas is equal to that of a triangle having their
height and base length equal to the perimeter of the polygon. But their height is less than the
radius of the circle, and the perimeter is less than the circumference of the circle. Hence their
total area must be less that that of the triangle having height the radius of the circle and base the
circumference. This gives a contradiction, so that triangle cannot have area less than the circles.
Supposing that the triangles area is greater than the circles leads to another contradiction on
considering a sequence of polygons circumscribed about the circle-so the two must be exactly
equal.

Archimedes does an Integral

Archimedes realized that in finding the area of a circle, another problem was solved, that of
finding the area of the curved surface of a cone (like an old-fashioned ice-cream cone). If such a
cone is opened out by cutting a straight line up from its point, it will have the shape of a fan-that
is, a segment of a circle. Its area will then be that fraction of the full circles area that its curved
edge is of the full circles circumference. He also showed how to find the curved area of a slice
of a cone, such as youd get by cutting off the top of an ice-cream cone, by which we mean the
other end from the point, cutting parallel to the top circle, to get a sort of ring-shaped bit of cone.
He than managed to calculate the surface area of a sphere. His approach was as follows: imagine
where Charlottesville appears on a globe, on the 38th parallel. This parallel is a ring going all the
way around the globe at a constant distance down from the North Pole. Now consider the part of
the globe surface between this 38th parallel and the 39th parallel. This is a ribbon of surface going
around, and is very close to a slice of a cone, if we choose a cone of the right size and angle.
Archimedes strategy was to divide the whole surface into ribbons like this, and find the area of
each ribbon by taking it to be part of a cone. He then summed up the ribbon areas. Lastly, he
took thinner and thinner ribbons to get an accurate result, using the method of exhaustion to
prove that the area of the sphere was 4pir2. This is precisely equivalent to a modern integral
calculus solution of the same problem, and just as rigorous (but more difficult!)

Conclusion
It is clear from the above discussion that the Greeks laid the essential groundwork and even
began to build the structure of much of modern mathematics. It should also be emphasized that
although some great mathematicians devoted their lives to this work, it nevertheless took three
centuries of cumulative effort, each building on the previous work. Evidently, this required a
stable, literate culture over many generations. Geometric results are difficult to transmit in an
oral tradition! Recall that Archimedes was killed drawing diagrams in the sand for his pupils.
This level of mathematical analysis attained by Archimedes, Euclid and others is far in advance
of anything recorded by the Babylonians or Egyptians.

In preparing this lecture I used :

A Source Book in Greek Science, M. R. Cohen and I. E. Drabkin, Harvard, 1966

Copyright except where otherwise noted 1996 Michael Fowler
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How the Greeks Used Geometry to Understand the Stars

Michael Fowler, University of Virginia 9/16/2008

Crystal Spheres: Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle

Plato, with his belief that the world was constructed with geometric simplicity and elegance, felt
certain that the sun, moon and planets, being made of aither, would have a natural circular
motion, since that is the simplest uniform motion that repeats itself endlessly, as their motion did.
However, although the fixed stars did in fact move in simple circles about the North star, the
sun, moon and planets traced out much more complicated paths across the sky. These paths had
been followed closely and recorded since early Babylonian civilization, so were very well
known. Plato suggested that perhaps these complicated paths were actually combinations of
simple circular motions, and challenged his Athenian colleagues to prove it.
The first real progress on the problem was made by Eudoxus, at Platos academy. Eudoxus
placed all the fixed stars on a huge sphere, the earth itself a much smaller sphere fixed at the
center. The huge sphere rotated about the earth once every twenty-four hours. So far, this is the

standard starry vault picture. Then Eudoxus assumed the sun to be attached to another sphere,
concentric with the fixed stars sphere, that is, it was also centered on the earth. This new sphere,
lying entirely inside the sphere carrying the fixed stars, had to be transparent, since the fixed
stars are very visible. The new sphere was attached to the fixed stars sphere so that it, too, went
around every twenty-four hours, but in addition it rotated slowly about the two axis points where
it was attached to the big sphere, and this extra rotation was once a year. This meant that the sun,
viewed against the backdrop of the fixed stars, traced out a big circular path which it covered in a
year. This path is the ecliptic. To get it all right, the ecliptic has to be tilted at 23 degrees to the
equator line of the fixed stars, taking the North star as the north pole.
This gives a pretty accurate representation of the suns motion, but it didnt quite account for all
the known observations at that time. For one thing, if the sun goes around the ecliptic at an
exactly uniform rate, the time intervals between the solstices and the equinoxes will all be equal.
In fact, theyre not-so the sun moves a little faster around some parts of its yearly journey
through the ecliptic than other parts. This, and other considerations, led to the introduction of
three more spheres to describe the suns motion. Of course, to actually show that the
combination of these motions gave an accurate representation of the suns observed motion
required considerable geometric skill! Aristotle wrote a summary of the state of the art in
accounting for all the observed planetary motions, and also those of the sun and the moon. This
required the introduction of fifty-five concentric transparent spheres. Still, it did account for
everything observed in terms of simple circular motion, the only kind of motion thought to be
allowed for aither. Aristotle himself believed the crystal spheres existed as physical entities,
although Eudoxus may have viewed them as simply a computational device.
It is interesting to note that, despite our earlier claim that the Greeks discovered nature, Plato
believed the planets to be animate beings. He argued that it was not possible that they should
accurately describe their orbits year after year if they didnt know what they were doingthat is,
if they had no soul attached.

Measuring the Earth, the Moon and the Sun: Eratosthenes and Aristarchus
A little later, Eratosthenes and Aristarchus between them got some idea of the size of the earthsun-moon system, as we discussed in an earlier lecture.
And, to quote from Archimedes (see Heath, Greek Astronomy),
Aristarchus of Samos brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, in which the
premises lead to the conclusion that the universe is many times greater than it is presently
thought to be. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain motionless, that the
earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the

orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same center as the sun, is so great
that the circular orbit of the earth is as small as a point compared with that sphere.
The tiny size of the earths orbit is necessary to understand why the fixed stars do not move
relative to each other as the earth goes around its orbit.
Aristarchus model was not accepted, nor even was the suggestion that the earth rotates about its
axis every twenty-four hours.
However, the model of the fifty-five crystal spheres was substantially improved on. It did have
some obvious defects. For example, the sun, moon and planets necessarily each kept a constant
distance from the earth, since each was attached to a sphere centered on the earth. Yet it was
well-known that the apparent size of the moon varied about ten per cent or so, and the obvious
explanation was that its distance from the earth must be varying. So how could it be attached to
a sphere centered on the earth? The planets, too, especially Mars, varied considerably in
brightness compared with the fixed stars, and again this suggested that the distance from the
earth to Mars must vary in time.

Cycles and Epicycles: Hipparchus and Ptolemy

A new way of combining circular motions to account for the movements of the sun, moon and
planets was introduced by Hipparchus (second century BC) and realized fully by Ptolemy
(around AD 150). Hipparchus was aware the seasons werent quite the same length, so he
suggested that the sun went around a circular path at uniform speed, but that the earth wasnt in
the center of the circle. Now the solstices and equinoxes are determined by how the tilt of the
earths axis lines up with the sun, so the directions of these places from the earth are at right
angles. If the circle is off center, though, some of these seasons will be shorter than others. We
know the shortest season is fall (in our hemisphere).
Another way of using circular motions was provided by Hipparchus theory of the moon. This
introduced the idea of the epicycle, a small circular motion riding around a big circular motion.
(See below for pictures of epicycles in the discussion of Ptolemy.) The moons position in the
sky could be well represented by such a model. In fact, so could all the planets. One problem
was that to figure out the planets position in the sky, that is, the line of sight from the earth,
given its position on the cycle and on the epicycle, needs trigonometry. Hipparchus developed
trigonometry to make these calculations possible.
Ptolemy wrote the bible of Greek (and other ancient) astronomical observations in his
immense book, the Almagest. This did for astronomy at the time what Euclids Elements did
for geometry. It gave huge numbers of tables by which the positions of planets, sun and moon
could be accurately calculated for centuries to come. We cannot here do justice to this

magnificent work, but I just want to mention one or two significant points which give the general
picture.
To illustrate the mechanism, we present here a slightly simplified version of his account of how
the planets moved. The main idea was that each planet (and also, of course, the sun and moon)
went around the earth in a cycle, a large circle centered at the center of the earth, but at the same
time the planets were describing smaller circles, or epicycles, about the point that was describing
the cycle. Mercury and Venus, as shown in the figure, had epicycles centered on the line from
the earth to the sun. This picture does indeed represent fairly accurately their apparent motion in
the skynote that they always appear fairly close to the sun, and are not visible in the middle of
the night.

The planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, on the other hand, can be seen through the night in some
years. Their motion is analyzed in terms of cycles greater than the suns, but with epicycles

exactly equal to the suns cycle, and with the planets at positions in their epicycles which
correspond to the suns position in its cyclesee the figure below.

This system of cycles and epicycles was built up to give an accurate account of the observed
motion of the planets. Actually, we have significantly simplified Ptolemys picture. He caused
some of the epicycles to be not quite centered on the cycles, they were termed eccentric. This
departure from apparent perfection was necessary for full agreement with observations, and we
shall return to it later. Ptolemys book was called the Almagest in the Middle Ages, the Arabic
prefix al with the Greek for the greatest the same as our prefix mega.

Ptolemys View of the Earth

It should perhaps be added that Ptolemy, centuries after Aristarchus, certainly did
not think the earth rotated. (Heath, Greek Astronomy, page 48). His point was that
the aither was lighter than any of the earthly elements, even fire, so it would be

easy for it to move rapidly, motion that would be difficult and unnatural for earth,
the heaviest material. And if the earth did rotate, Athens would be moving at
several hundred miles per hour. How could the air keep up? And even if somehow it
did, since it was light, what about heavy objects falling through the air? If somehow
the air was carrying them along, they must be very firmly attached to the air,
making it difficult to see how they could ever move relative to the air at all! Yet they
can be, since they can fall, so the whole idea must be wrong.

Ptolemy did, however, know that the earth was spherical. He pointed out that people living to
the east saw the sun rise earlier, and how much earlier was proportional to how far east they were
located. He also noted that, though all must see a lunar eclipse simultaneously, those to the east
will see it as later, e.g. at 1 a.m., say, instead of midnight, local time. He also observed that on
traveling to the north, Polaris rises in the sky, so this suggests the earth is curved in that direction
too. Finally, on approaching a hilly island from far away on a calm sea, he noted that the island
seemed to rise out of the sea. He attributed this phenomenon (correctly) to the curvature of the
earth.
Ptolemy Model for Inner Planets
Ptolemy Model for Outer Planets
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How the Greeks Used Geometry to Understand the Stars

Michael Fowler, University of Virginia 9/16/2008

Crystal Spheres: Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle

Plato, with his belief that the world was constructed with geometric simplicity and elegance, felt
certain that the sun, moon and planets, being made of aither, would have a natural circular
motion, since that is the simplest uniform motion that repeats itself endlessly, as their motion did.
However, although the fixed stars did in fact move in simple circles about the North star, the
sun, moon and planets traced out much more complicated paths across the sky. These paths had
been followed closely and recorded since early Babylonian civilization, so were very well
known. Plato suggested that perhaps these complicated paths were actually combinations of
simple circular motions, and challenged his Athenian colleagues to prove it.

The first real progress on the problem was made by Eudoxus, at Platos academy. Eudoxus
placed all the fixed stars on a huge sphere, the earth itself a much smaller sphere fixed at the
center. The huge sphere rotated about the earth once every twenty-four hours. So far, this is the
standard starry vault picture. Then Eudoxus assumed the sun to be attached to another sphere,
concentric with the fixed stars sphere, that is, it was also centered on the earth. This new sphere,
lying entirely inside the sphere carrying the fixed stars, had to be transparent, since the fixed
stars are very visible. The new sphere was attached to the fixed stars sphere so that it, too, went
around every twenty-four hours, but in addition it rotated slowly about the two axis points where
it was attached to the big sphere, and this extra rotation was once a year. This meant that the sun,
viewed against the backdrop of the fixed stars, traced out a big circular path which it covered in a
year. This path is the ecliptic. To get it all right, the ecliptic has to be tilted at 23 degrees to the
equator line of the fixed stars, taking the North star as the north pole.
This gives a pretty accurate representation of the suns motion, but it didnt quite account for all
the known observations at that time. For one thing, if the sun goes around the ecliptic at an
exactly uniform rate, the time intervals between the solstices and the equinoxes will all be equal.
In fact, theyre not-so the sun moves a little faster around some parts of its yearly journey
through the ecliptic than other parts. This, and other considerations, led to the introduction of
three more spheres to describe the suns motion. Of course, to actually show that the
combination of these motions gave an accurate representation of the suns observed motion
required considerable geometric skill! Aristotle wrote a summary of the state of the art in
accounting for all the observed planetary motions, and also those of the sun and the moon. This
required the introduction of fifty-five concentric transparent spheres. Still, it did account for
everything observed in terms of simple circular motion, the only kind of motion thought to be
allowed for aither. Aristotle himself believed the crystal spheres existed as physical entities,
although Eudoxus may have viewed them as simply a computational device.
It is interesting to note that, despite our earlier claim that the Greeks discovered nature, Plato
believed the planets to be animate beings. He argued that it was not possible that they should
accurately describe their orbits year after year if they didnt know what they were doingthat is,
if they had no soul attached.

Measuring the Earth, the Moon and the Sun: Eratosthenes and Aristarchus
A little later, Eratosthenes and Aristarchus between them got some idea of the size of the earthsun-moon system, as we discussed in an earlier lecture.
And, to quote from Archimedes (see Heath, Greek Astronomy),
Aristarchus of Samos brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, in which the
premises lead to the conclusion that the universe is many times greater than it is presently

thought to be. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain motionless, that the
earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the
orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same center as the sun, is so great
that the circular orbit of the earth is as small as a point compared with that sphere.
The tiny size of the earths orbit is necessary to understand why the fixed stars do not move
relative to each other as the earth goes around its orbit.
Aristarchus model was not accepted, nor even was the suggestion that the earth rotates about its
axis every twenty-four hours.
However, the model of the fifty-five crystal spheres was substantially improved on. It did have
some obvious defects. For example, the sun, moon and planets necessarily each kept a constant
distance from the earth, since each was attached to a sphere centered on the earth. Yet it was
well-known that the apparent size of the moon varied about ten per cent or so, and the obvious
explanation was that its distance from the earth must be varying. So how could it be attached to
a sphere centered on the earth? The planets, too, especially Mars, varied considerably in
brightness compared with the fixed stars, and again this suggested that the distance from the
earth to Mars must vary in time.

Cycles and Epicycles: Hipparchus and Ptolemy

A new way of combining circular motions to account for the movements of the sun, moon and
planets was introduced by Hipparchus (second century BC) and realized fully by Ptolemy
(around AD 150). Hipparchus was aware the seasons werent quite the same length, so he
suggested that the sun went around a circular path at uniform speed, but that the earth wasnt in
the center of the circle. Now the solstices and equinoxes are determined by how the tilt of the
earths axis lines up with the sun, so the directions of these places from the earth are at right
angles. If the circle is off center, though, some of these seasons will be shorter than others. We
know the shortest season is fall (in our hemisphere).
Another way of using circular motions was provided by Hipparchus theory of the moon. This
introduced the idea of the epicycle, a small circular motion riding around a big circular motion.
(See below for pictures of epicycles in the discussion of Ptolemy.) The moons position in the
sky could be well represented by such a model. In fact, so could all the planets. One problem
was that to figure out the planets position in the sky, that is, the line of sight from the earth,
given its position on the cycle and on the epicycle, needs trigonometry. Hipparchus developed
trigonometry to make these calculations possible.
Ptolemy wrote the bible of Greek (and other ancient) astronomical observations in his
immense book, the Almagest. This did for astronomy at the time what Euclids Elements did

for geometry. It gave huge numbers of tables by which the positions of planets, sun and moon
could be accurately calculated for centuries to come. We cannot here do justice to this
magnificent work, but I just want to mention one or two significant points which give the general
picture.
To illustrate the mechanism, we present here a slightly simplified version of his account of how
the planets moved. The main idea was that each planet (and also, of course, the sun and moon)
went around the earth in a cycle, a large circle centered at the center of the earth, but at the same
time the planets were describing smaller circles, or epicycles, about the point that was describing
the cycle. Mercury and Venus, as shown in the figure, had epicycles centered on the line from
the earth to the sun. This picture does indeed represent fairly accurately their apparent motion in
the skynote that they always appear fairly close to the sun, and are not visible in the middle of
the night.

The planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, on the other hand, can be seen through the night in some
years. Their motion is analyzed in terms of cycles greater than the suns, but with epicycles
exactly equal to the suns cycle, and with the planets at positions in their epicycles which
correspond to the suns position in its cyclesee the figure below.

This system of cycles and epicycles was built up to give an accurate account of the observed
motion of the planets. Actually, we have significantly simplified Ptolemys picture. He caused
some of the epicycles to be not quite centered on the cycles, they were termed eccentric. This
departure from apparent perfection was necessary for full agreement with observations, and we
shall return to it later. Ptolemys book was called the Almagest in the Middle Ages, the Arabic
prefix al with the Greek for the greatest the same as our prefix mega.

Ptolemys View of the Earth

It should perhaps be added that Ptolemy, centuries after Aristarchus, certainly did
not think the earth rotated. (Heath, Greek Astronomy, page 48). His point was that
the aither was lighter than any of the earthly elements, even fire, so it would be
easy for it to move rapidly, motion that would be difficult and unnatural for earth,
the heaviest material. And if the earth did rotate, Athens would be moving at
several hundred miles per hour. How could the air keep up? And even if somehow it
did, since it was light, what about heavy objects falling through the air? If somehow
the air was carrying them along, they must be very firmly attached to the air,
making it difficult to see how they could ever move relative to the air at all! Yet they
can be, since they can fall, so the whole idea must be wrong.

Ptolemy did, however, know that the earth was spherical. He pointed out that people living to
the east saw the sun rise earlier, and how much earlier was proportional to how far east they were
located. He also noted that, though all must see a lunar eclipse simultaneously, those to the east
will see it as later, e.g. at 1 a.m., say, instead of midnight, local time. He also observed that on
traveling to the north, Polaris rises in the sky, so this suggests the earth is curved in that direction
too. Finally, on approaching a hilly island from far away on a calm sea, he noted that the island
seemed to rise out of the sea. He attributed this phenomenon (correctly) to the curvature of the
earth.
Ptolemy Model for Inner Planets
Ptolemy Model for Outer Planets
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How Classical Knowledge Reached Baghdad

Michael Fowler (This is a Draft Version, 10/2/07)

The Classical Achievement in Mathematics and Science

With Ptolemys Almagest giving detailed accounts and predictions of the movement
of the planets, we reach the end of the great classical period in science. Lets
review what was achieved.

First, the Babylonians developed a very efficient system of numbers and measures
of all kind, primarily for business purposes. Unfortunately, it did not pass through to
the Greeks and Romans, except for measures of time and angle, presumably those
are the units relevant for recording astronomical observations. The Babylonians
kept meticulous astronomical records over many centuries, mainly for astrological
purposes, but also to maintain and adjust the calendar. They had tables of squares
they used to aid multiplication, and even recorded solutions to word problems which
were a kind of pre-algebra, a technique broadened and developed millennia later in
Baghdad, as we shall see.

The Egyptians developed geometry for land measurement (thats what it means!),
the land being measured for tax assessment.

The Greeks, beginning with Thales then Pythagoras, later Euclid, Archimedes and
Apollonius, greatly extended geometry, building a logical system of theorems and
proofs, based on a few axioms. An early result of this very abstract approach was
the Pythagoreans deduction that the square root of 2 could not be expressed as a
ratio of whole numbers. This was a result they didnt want to be true, and that noone would have guessed. Remember, they believed that God constructed the
Universe out of pure numbers! Their accepting of this new irrational truth was a
testimony to their honesty and clear mindedness.

The development of geometry took many generations: it could only happen because
people with some leisure were able to record and preserve for the next generation
complicated arguments and results. They went far beyond what was of immediate
practical value and pursued it as an intellectual discipline. Plato strongly believed
such efforts led to clarity of thought, a valuable quality in leaders. In fact, above
the door of his academy he apparently wrote: let no one who cannot think
geometrically enter here.

Over this same period, the Greeks began to think scientifically, meaning that they
began to talk of natural origins for phenomena, such as lightning, thunder and
earthquakes, rather than assuming they were messages from angry gods. Similarly,
Hippocrates saw epilepsy as a physical disease, possibly treatable by diet or life
style, rather than demonic possession, as was widely believed at the time (and
much later!).

The geometric and scientific came together in analyzing the motion of the planets in
terms of combinations of circular motions, an approach suggested by Plato, and
culminating in Ptolemys Almagest. This Greek approach to astronomy strongly
contrasted with that of the Babylonians, who had made precise solar, lunar and
planetary observations for many hundreds of years, enough data to predict future
events, such as eclipses, fairly accurately, yet they never attempted to construct
geometric models to analyze those complex motions.

Why did Mathematics and Science Grind to a Halt?

Why did the development of science on the ancient world pretty much end after 800
years, around 200 AD or so? For one thing, the Romans were now dominant, and
although they were excellent engineers, building thousands of miles of roads,
hundreds of military garrisons, and so on, they did very little science. And, the
Greeks themselves lost interest: Platos Academy began to concentrate on rhetoric,
the art of speechmaking. Perhaps this had been found to be more valuable for an
aspiring leader than the ability to think geometrically or scientificallyor perhaps
better for winning elections and persuading people. Furthermore, with the
conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity around 300 AD, saving souls
became a top priority in the Catholic church. As St. Augustine put it,

"Nor need we be afraid lest the Christian should be rather ignorant of the force and
number of the elements, the motion, order and eclipses of the heavenly bodies, the
form of the heavens, the kinds and natures of animals, shrubs and stones ... It is
enough for the Christian to believe that the cause of all created things, whether
heavenly or earthly, whether visible or invisible, is none other than the goodness of
the Creator, who is the one true God."

Its a little puzzling to put this together with Botticellis picture, showing Augustine
looking prayerful but with scientific instruments in plain sight! (Augustine was very
interested in science and many other unholy things earlier in life.)

St. Augustine by Botticelli (Wikipedia Commons).

But Some Christians Preserved the Classical Knowledge

Actually, the story of the treatment of the Greek mathematical and scientific
knowledge by the early Christian church is complicated, like the church itself. Recall
that mathematics and science effectively ended in Alexandria with the murder of
Hypatia in 415 AD, ordered by the Patriarch Cyril. This same Cyril engaged in a
violent theological quarrel with the Patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius. The
question was the relative importance of the Virgin Mary. Cyril demanded that she
be referred to as the Mother of God, Nestor would only accept Mother of Christ. This
was all part of a debate about the nature of Christ: did he have two natures, human
and divine, or one nature? Nestor thought two, of which only one, the human, died
on the cross. Getting this right was very important: it was believed that salvation
depended on it. However, the dispute was also (and perhaps principally) a struggle
for power. At the Council of Ephesus in 431, Cyril arrived early with a large group of
strong men, handed out bribes, and got the assembled bishops to condemn Nestor
as a heretic. (Further complications ensued at later Councils, see for example The
Closing of the Western Mind, Charles Freeman, Knopf, 2002, page 259 on, but it was
all bad news for Nestor and his followers, who became known as Nestorians.)

How the Nestorians Helped Science Survive

What has this got to do with science? It is a crucial link in the chain. In contrast to
most of the rest of the church, the Nestorians preserved and read the works of
Aristotle, Plato, etc., and translated many of them into Syriac. They felt that clear
thinking was useful in theology. Being declared heretics meant that it was no longer
a good idea to stay in the Roman Empire, and, in fact, they were expelled.

Lets briefly review the extent of the Roman Empire to understand what expulsion
implied.
The maps below are from:
http://www.roman-empire.net/maps/empire/extent/augustus.html

At its greatest extent, in 116 AD, pictured above, notice that the Empire included
almost all of present-day Iraq, including the port of Basra (bottom right, on the
Persian Gulf). However, this didnt last longthe Romans most powerful enemy, the
Persians (now known as Iranians), recaptured the territory after a short Roman
occupation.

At the time of the death of Constantine, 337 AD, the Empire was officially Christian.
The eastern part of the Empire, ruled from Constantinople and Greek speaking,
became known as Byzantium. The Empires total extent is shown below:

The Nestorians found temporary refuge with Syriac speaking sympathizers in

Edessa (see Google map below, 37 10 N, 38 47 E. Istanbul (top left) is of course
Constantinople):

(Nestor was a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia in Antioch, Syria. When Nestor was
condemned, these Arab Christians broke with the Byzantine church, forming the
Assyrian Church of the East, see Wikipedia.)

On into Persia
This was all during the time of the second Persian Empire (226-651), the Sassanid
Empire.
The Sassanid Persian kings saw an opportunity to handle their own considerable
number of Christian subjects better. They granted protection to Nestorians in 462,
then in 484, they executed the Bishop of Nisibis (37 04 N, 41 13 E) (who was anti
Nestorian, pro Byzantine) and replaced him with a Nestorian. (This is from
Wikipedia.) The Nestorians settled in the Persian Empire, moving eventually to
Gundishapur (near modern Dezful, at 32 25 N, 48 26 E). These Nestorians sent out
many missionaries, for example reaching China in 635, and even Korea, and
founding many churches, races still remain today. (However, foreign religions were
suppressed in China in the 800s.)

The academy at Gundishapir had Syraic as the working language. Under a Sassanid
monarch, Khosrau I, 531 579 AD, it became famous for learning. Although
Khosrau I was a Zoroastrian, the dominant Persian religion, he was tolerant of all
religions, in fact one of his sons became a Christian. He greatly improved the
infrastructure, building palaces, strong defenses, and irrigation canals. He
encourages science and art, collecting books from all over the known world, and
introducing chess from India. (Trivial Fact: Checkmate is a corruption of the
Persian shah mat, meaning the king is dead.) He had Syriac and Greek works
translated into Persian. He also sent a famous physician Borzuyeh to India to invite
Indian and Chinese scholars to Gundishapur.

The Advent of Islamic Rule

In 622, the prophet Muhammad left hostile Mecca to found his own theocratic state
in Medina (just over two hundred miles to the north, both in western Saudi Arabia).
He readily attracted converts, and built an army that captured Mecca eight years
later. He died in 632, but his armies continued to conquer. Both Romans and
Persians were by this point rather weak militarily, having spent decades fighting
each other. The Sassanid dynasty fell to Muslim Arab armies in 638 AD. Alexandria
was conquered in 642. These Muslims, although at war with Byzantium, were
tolerant of their ethnic brethren, the Arab Christians. The first dynasty, the
Umayyad (660 750), centered in Damascus, included Hisham ibn Abd as-Malik,
who encouraged the arts, education, and translation of numerous literary and
scientific masterpieces into Arabic (Wikipedia). ( The Muslim Empire was now vast:
a Hindu rebellion in Sindh was subdued; at the same time Umayyad armies went
north from Spain, but were defeated at Tours, France, in 732. It has been argued
that if the Arab armies had won at Tours, all Europe would have become Islamic, and
still would be.)

In 749, a second dynasty, the Abbasid caliphate, began. In 762 the Abbasid Caliph
al-Mansur built a magnificent new capital: Baghdad. Al-Mansur emulated the
Persian rulers, building a palace library like the Sassanid Imperial Library, except
that now everything was to be translated into Arabic. Harun ar-Rashid, Caliph from
786 to 808, sent agents to buy Greek manuscripts from Constantinople, to be
translated into Arabic. At the same time, the Siddhantas wrrived from India: a set of
Indian astronomical works, including trigonometric tables that likely originated with
Hipparchus, and had then found their way to the Greek cities in India and
Afghanistan founded by Alexander. (Its worth noting that the first paper mill
outside China was built in Baghdad in 794, the secret having been given by
prisoners of war from a battle against the Chinese in Central Asia. In fact, the cheap
availability of paper made the complex Abbasid bureaucracy reasonably efficient.)

Meanwhile, Gundishapur wasnt far away: generously funded court appointments

drew physicians (including al-Mansurs personal physician) and teachers to
Baghdad.

Later, under the Abbasid Caliph al-Mamun (813 833), the House of Wisdom was
founded (in 828): a large library and translation center into Arabic: first from
Persian, then Syriac, then Greek. Many works were translated from Syriac into
Arabic, including some Archimedes and all Euclid. Hunayn, a Christian, from
Jundishapur, redid many translations to make them more readable.

The House of Wisdom: al-Khwarismi

Perhaps the most famous scholar from the House of Wisdom is Al-Khwarismi (780
850). The word algorithm, meaning some kind of computational procedure, is just a
mangling of his name. This is because he wrote the book that introduced the Hindu
numbering system (now known as Arabic) to the Western world, and medieval
scholars used his name to refer to routines for multiplication using Arabic numbers,
far more efficient than anything possible with the previously used Roman numerals!

He also wrote the book on algebra: that word is actually al-jabr meaning
completion. (Well see below why this is an appropriate term.) Actually, he didnt
use symbols to denote unknown quantities, now the essence of algebra. Ironically,
such symbols had been used by the Greek Diophantus, in Alexandria, in the 200s
AD, but that work was apparently unknown to the Arabs. Instead, al-Khwarismi
stated algebraic problems as word problems, as the Babylonians had over two
millennia earlier, but he also gave geometric representations of his solutions.

Lets look at one of his examples: x 10 x 39. (OK, Ive cheated by using x: he
wrote it all out in words, but his thought process was as outlined below.)
2

This he thought of in terms of equating areas: a very natural approach to something

beginning with a square! On the left we have a square of side x and a rectangle of
sides x and 10.

His strategy is to add area to this to make it one big squarehe takes the rectangle
and divides it into four equal rectangles each having sides x and 10/4 = 5/2. He
then glues these to the x square:

The next step is to extend this to give just one square, by adding the green bits.
But to keep the equation valid, the same amount must of course be added to the
other side. That is, 5/25/24 is to be added to each side. We can see that on the
left we now have a square of side x + 5. on the right hand side, we have 39 + 25 =
64 = 88. Therefore, x + 5 = 8, and x = 3.

So by adding to both sides we have completed the square, and al-jabr is this
adding to get completion. Negative numbers were not in use at that time, so
quadratics like x 10 x 39 , for example, were treated separately, and several
distinct cases had to be explained.
2

Its not clear that al-Khwarismis own contribution, by which I mean really new
mathematics, was great, but his influence was tremendous: his presentation of
algebra, and of the Arab numerals, sparked much further mathematical
development, both in Baghdad and, later, in the West, as we shall see.
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Later Islamic Science

This is a First Draft

The Islamic World

Our interest here is in the scientific developments that took place in the Islamic
world. We will look at a few of the most famous of the Islamic scientists, and only
mention very briefly the political context in each case: the spread of Islam over
much of the known world, and the subsequent political changes, were very
complex. For example, after Baghdad, Cordoba in Spain became the preeminent
center for science, but Spain was under the Umayyads, not the Abbasid caliph.

Furthermore, some of the greatest Islamic scientists were Persian, and political
developments there included a Shia revival in the tenth century, the Sunni Abbasids
thereby losing their eastern empire, followed by a Turkish (Sunni) takeoverthe
Turks having been brought in as a palace guard.

Omar Khayyam
Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapur, in present-day northeastern Iran (see map) in
1048, a time when most of Persia (Iran) was under (Seljuk) Turkish rule. Initially, he
did not find it a good environment for scholarly work, and in 1070 moved to
Samarkand (see map). He did manage to write a famous book on Algebra.

His main contribution to that subject is a serious attack on cubic equations, such as
finding x given that 2x3 2x2 + 2x 1 = 0. This particular problem has a geometric
origin:

Given that for the right-angled triangle shown, the sum of the height and the
shortest side is equal to the hypotenuse, find the ratio of the length of the shortest
side to that of the other side.

Later Malik Shah, the third Seljuk sultan, and his Persian vizier al-Mulk, invited
Khayyam to head up his observatory in Esfahan (his capital city, directly south of
Teheran, see map). Khayyam measured the length of the year, getting
365.242198days. This is correct to within one second: the error is in that last digit
only!

Unfortunately for Khayyam, his friend the vizier was murdered by a terrorist group,
the Assassins, who specifically targeted important political figures, on the road to
Baghdad in 1092, and Malik-Shah died soon after that. His widow discontinued the
observatory funding, but later his son Sanjar founded a center in Turkmenistan
where Khayyam continued to do mathematics.

Omak Khayyam is also famous for his writings, such as the Rubaiyat. However,
these have a distinctly irreligious flavor, and he had to tread carefully to minimize
trouble with the Muslim religious authorities.

Note: many of the above facts are from the St Andrews website.

Al-Tusi
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was born in Tus, in northwest Iran (near Nishapur) in 1201.

He studies as a child at a mainly Shia religious school in Tus, followed by secondary

education in Nishapur. However, around 1220, the Mongols invaded the area,
causing much destruction. Al-Tusi found refuge with the Assassins in their mountain
fortress at Alamut :

It isnt clear whether or not al-Tusi was actually a prisoner, but it is clear that he did
some important scholarly work in this relatively quiet environment, writing on
astronomy, mathematics, philosophy and ethics.

Nevertheless, when the Mongols, led by Ghengis Khans grandson Hulagu (pictured
below), took Alamut in 1256, al-Tusi switched sides, and the Mongols appointed him
their scientific advisor.

Al-Tusi was with the Mongols when they attacked Baghdad in 1258. Apparently if
the Caliph (the last of the Abbasids) had surrendered, little damage would have
been done, but instead he refused, told Hulagu that God would avenge, but the
Caliph did little to prepare defenses. The Mongols attacked (after a brief siege
organized by a Chinese general), wrecking the Grand Library and throwing all the
books in the river, burning down mosques and other buildings that were the work of
generations, slaughtering the citizenry with abandon, breaking up the canal system
that had kept the area fertile, and leaving too few survivors to repair the canals.
This was the end of Baghdad as a cultural center for many centuries. The Mongols
went on to fight with Egypt, but this time they were turned back in what is now the
West Bank by superior Egyptian cavalry, in 1260: the same year that the Hulagus
brother Kublai Khan became Emperor of China, with his capital at Beijing. The
Mongols in the Far East reached their limit when they attempted to invade Japan in
the 1270s and 80s: their fleet was destroyed by a massive typhoon, one the
Japanese termed kamikaze, meaning divine wind.

After Hulagu destroyed Baghdad, he constructed, at al-Tusis suggestion, a

magnificent observatory at Marageh in northwest Iran (see map above) with al-Tusi
in charge. The observatory opened in 1262, and al-Tusi brought together many
scholars and scientists. The observatory became, essentially, a university: al-Tusi
had several pupils who made important contributions, and in fact his role was
central in reviving Islamic science.

Al-Tusi himself developed plane and spherical trigonometry and wrote the first
complete book on the subject. He also made the first really significant advance on
Ptolemys Almagest. Although Ptolemys work described the planetary motions
well, it contained some aesthetically unappealing featuresit had strayed far from
Platos long ago suggestion that all should be described in terms of combinations of
circular motions. In particular, accounting for the lack of coplanarity of planetary
orbits required what amounted to an up-and-down linear component in planetary
motion. Perhaps al-Tusis most famous achievement was to demonstrate how such
motion could be generated by a combination of two circular motions, see the
animation at Tusi couple!

Heres his original explanation, from a Vatican exhibit:

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Galileo and the Telescope

Michael Fowler, UVa Physics

Copernicus Challenges Ptolemys Scheme

Ptolemys picture of the solar system was almost fully accepted for the next fourteen hundred
years, to be challenged by Copernicus (real name: Nicolaus Koppernigk) a mathematician and
astronomer with a Polish father and a German mother, in 1530.
Copernicus picture of the solar system had the sun at the center, and the earth went around it, as
did the other planets.

We show here the picture from his original publication. Notice that the only exception to the rule
that everything goes around the sun is the moon, which continues to go around the earth. One
objection to the picture was that if the earth was indeed just another planet, how come it was the
only one with a moon?
Other objections were based on the Aristotelian point of viewit was difficult to believe that all
the other planets were composed of aither, and the earth of the other four elements, if they were
all behaving in so similar a fashion. A further objection, which had long ago been raised by
Aristotle to the idea of a rotating earth, was that the stresses would cause it to fly apart, and
furthermore, anything thrown in the air would land far to the west.
Despite these problems, Pope Clement VII approved of a summary of Copernicus work in 1530,
and asked for a copy of the full work when it was available. this was not until 1543, the year
Copernicus died.
As Copernicus new picture of the universe became more widely known, misgivings arose. The
universe had after all been created for mankind, so why wasnt mankind at the center? An
intellectual revolutionary called Giordano Bruno accepted Copernicus view, and went further,
claiming that the stars were spread through an infinite space, not just on an outer sphere, and
there were infinitely many inhabited worlds. Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.
The real breakthrough that ultimately led to the acceptance of Copernicus theory was due to
Galileo, but was actually a technological rather than a conceptual breakthrough. It was Galileos
refinement and clever use of the telescope that persuaded people that the moon was a lot like the
earth, and in some ways, so were the planets.

The Evolution of the Telescope

(This section is mostly just a summary of Van Heldens excellent Introduction to Sidereus
Nuncius, University of Chicago Press, 1989)
The first known use of a magnifying glass to aid in reading was in the 1200s, by Roger Bacon at
Oxford. It proved a boon to aging scholars, many of whom had been forced to retire while still
relatively young. The idea spread throughout Europe, and Italian craftsmen, were making
glasses for old men before 1300, (lens means lentil in Italian, so called because of the shape of
the pieces of glass used) and for the myopic young not until a hundred and fifty years later. The
reading glasses for the old men, who were longsighted, were convex lenses, (bulging in the
middle like () ), whereas the glasses required by the shortsighted young were concave lenses,
thinner in the middle than at the edges like )( , and hence more difficult to make and not so
robust. The first time, as far as we know, that anyone put two lenses together to make a
telescope-like optical instrument was in 1608, in Holland. The inventor of an opera-glass like

telescope was called Lipperhey. He was unable to get a patent, however, because his invention
was deemed too easy to reproduce. Perhaps the reason it had not been done before was that to
get magnification, one needs a concave lens stronger than the convex lens being used with it, and
commonly the lenses in wide use were the other way around.
Galileo found out about this invention in the spring of 1609, and immediately set about
improving it. He saw it as a possible way out of his financial difficulties. He was an oldest son,
and so was responsible for his younger sisters dowries. He also had three children of his own,
by his mistress. At the time, he was a Professor of Mathematics in the University of Padua, in
the Venetian Republic. He soon put together a spyglass with a magnification of three, which
many other people had already done. Galileo was an excellent experimentalist, and working
with different lenses, he realized that the magnification was proportional to the ratio of the power
of the concave (eyepiece) lens to the convex (more distant) lens. In other words, to get high
magnification he needed a weak convex lens and a strong concave lens. the problem was that the
opticians only made glasses in a narrow range of strengths, and three or so was the best
magnification available with off the shelf lenses. Galileo therefore learned to grind his own
lenses, and by August, he had achieved about ninefold linear magnification. This was an
enormous improvement over everything else on the market. Galileo therefore approached the
Senate of Venice to demonstrate his instrument. Many senators climbed the highest belltowers in
Venice to look through the glass at ships far out at sea, and were impressed by the obvious
military potential of the invention.
Galileo then wrote a letter to the Doge:
Galileo Galilei, a most humble servant of Your Serene Highness, being diligently attentive, with
all his spirit, not only to discharging the duties pertaining to the lecturing of mathematics at the
University of Padua, but also to bringing extraordinary benefit to Your Serene Highness with
some useful and remarkable invention, now appear before You with a new contrivance of
glasses, drawn from the most recondite speculations of perspective, which render visible objects
so close to the eye and represent them so distinctly that those that are distant, for example, nine
miles appear as though they were only one mile distant. This is a thing of inestimable benefit for
all transactions and undertakings, maritime or terrestrial, allowing us at sea to discover at a
much greater distance than usual the hulls and sails of the enemy, so that for two hours or more
we can detect him before he detects us...
Galileo concludes the letter by asking for tenure:
....(the telescope is) one of the fruits of the science which he has professed for the past 17 years
at the University of Padua, with the hope of carrying on his work in order to present You greater
ones, if it shall please the Good Lord and Your Serene Highness that he, according to his desire,
will pass the rest of his life in Your service.

It is nice to report that Galileo was granted tenure, and a reasonable salary, butthe bad news
with a proviso that further raises would not be forthcoming.

Mountains on the Moon

Galileos first major astronomical discovery with the telescope was that the Moons surface is
mountainous, and not a perfect sphere as had always been assumed (see his drawings in Sidereus
Nuncius). He built a convincing case for the reality of the mountains by sketching the
appearance of parts of the Moons surface at different times of the month, that is, under different
angles of lighting, and showing how the light and shadow seen could be simply and naturally
accounted for topographically, rendering the prevailing theory at the time, that the variations in
light arose from something inside a perfect sphere, a cumbersome and unappealing alternative.
This caused an uproar. He was able to estimate the height of the mountains on the moon by
seeing how far into the dark part bright spots could be discerned.

At half moon, a little geometry is enough to calculate the heights! Galileo himself worked an
example: suppose a bright spot, presumably an illuminated mountaintop, is visible one-twentieth
of a moon diameter into the dark side, at half-moon. Then the picture is as shown here (and is
taken from Sidereus Nuncius). The light from the sun fully illuminates the right-hand half of the
moon, plus, for example, the mountaintop at D. (GCD is a ray from the sun.) If the base of the
mountain, vertically below D, is at A, and E is the moons center, this is exactly the same
problem as how far away is the horizon, for a person of given height on a flat beach. It can be

solved using Pythagoras theorem as we did for that problem, with the center of the moon E one
of the points in the triangle, that is, the triangle is EDC.
A problem with asserting the existence of mountains is the apparent smooth roundness of the
edge of the Moon, for which Galileo had two arguments. First, ranges behind those on the edge
would tend to fill in the gaps. This is correct. Second, maybe things were fuzzed out by the
Moons atmosphere. This is wrong.
Galileos next major discovery began with his observation on January 7, 1610, of what he took to
be a rather odd set of three small fixed stars near Jupiter, and, in fact, collinear with the planet.
These stars were invisible to the naked eye. He looked again at Jupiter on successive nights, and
by the 15th had realized that he was looking at moons of Jupiter, which were going around the
planet with periods of the order of days. This caused even more consternation than the
demystification of the Moon. Seven was a sacred number, and there were seven planets,
wanderers, or moving stars. Jupiters moons spoiled this. Furthermore, they suggested that it
was o.k. to go in a circle about something other than the center of the universe, i.e. the Earth.
This made Copernicus argument, that the Moon goes around the Earth and the Earth around the
Sun, more plausible.
Again, Galileos grantsmanship is admirable. In a masterstroke of public relations, he named the
satellites after the Medici family, Dukes of Tuscany, where he applied for the position of
mathematician to the court. He sent his most recent 20X telescope to the Duke, so that he could
peruse the stars named after him and his brothers, and emphasized its military applicability.
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Life of Galileo
Michael Fowler, UVa Physics Department
NOTE: Many books have been written about Galileo, and, in particular, about his interaction
with the Church. An excellent short biography is Galileo, Stillman Drake, Oxford. One classic is
The Crime of Galileo, Giorgio de Santillana, 1955, University of Chicago Press. A fairly recent
biography by a journalist is Galileo, a Life, James Reston, Jr., HarperCollins.
(I am certainly no expert in this complex field of study, and just present a collection of facts
below to try to give the flavor of Galileos life and times.)
Galileo was born in Pisa, Tuscany in 1564, the son of Florentine musician Vincenzo Galilei.
Actually, Vincenzo was a revolutionary musicianhe felt the formal church music that then
dominated the scene had become sterile, and that classic Greek poetry and myths had a power

the church music lacked, that perhaps could be translated into modern music. He attempted
some of this, and his work began the development that culminated in Italian opera.
To understand something of Galileos early upbringing, here is a quote from his father, Vincenzo
Galileo:
It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion,
without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to
answer freely without any sort of adulation. That well becomes any who are sincere in the search
for truth.
(I took this from Reston, Page 9)
At age 17, Galileo went to the University of Pisa. He enrolled as a medical student, following
his fathers advice, but turned to math, after persuading his father that he didnt want to be a
doctor. His father allowed him to be tutored by the Tuscan court mathematician, Ricci, who
designed fortifications, which no doubt impressed Galileo (Reston, page 15).
Galileo proved to be an extremely talented mathematician, and in his early twenties he wrote
some tracts extending results of Archimedes on centers of gravity of shapes. At age 25, he was
appointed to the Chair of Mathematics at Pisa.
At age 28, in 1592, Galileo moved to a better position at Padua, in the Venetian Republic, where
he stayed until the age of 46.
Restons book certainly paints a vivid picture of the Venetian Republic at the time Galileo moved
there! Venice, a city of 150,000 people, apparently consumed 40 million bottles of wine annually.
There were more courtesans than in Rome. In 1599, Galileo met one Marina Gamba, 21 years
old. He had three children by her, greatly upsetting his mother. Galileo also spent a lot of time
with Sagredo, a young Venetian nobleman, both in the town and at Sagredos very fancy house,
or palace. Sagredo is featured as one of the disputants in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief
World Systems, and Two New Sciences. Another close friend during this period was Fra Paolo
Sarpi, a Servite friar, and official theologian to the Republic of Venice in 1606, when Pope Paul
put Venice under the interdict. Tensions between Venice and Rome were partly generated
because Venice wanted to be able to tax churches built in Venice by Rome. Sarpi advised the
Venetians to ignore the interdict, and the Jesuits were expelled from Venice. A nearly successful
attempt on Sarpis life was generally blamed on the Jesuits (from Drake, page 28).
When Galileo was 46 years old, in 1610, he developed the telescope, secured tenure and a big
raise at Padua, then went on to make all the discoveries announced in Sidereus Nuncius:
mountains on the moon, the moons of Jupiter, phases of Venus, etc. By naming the moons of

Jupiter after the Medici family, Galileo landed the job of Mathematician and Philosopher
(meaning Physicist) to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and was able to return to his native land.
This move upset his friends in Venice who had worked so hard to secure his promotion at Padua
only months before.
Of course, Galileos belief that his discoveries with the telescope strongly favored the
Copernican world view meant he was headed for trouble with the Church. In fact, his Venetian
friends warned him that it might be dangerous to leave the protection of the Venetian state.
In 1611, Galileo went to Rome and met with the Jesuit astronomers. Probably he felt that if he
could win them over, he would smooth his path in any future problems with the Church. Father
Clavius, author of Gregorian Calendar and undisputed leader of Jesuit astronomy had a hard time
believing there were mountains on the moon, but he surrendered with good grace on looking
through the telescope (Sant., pages 18, 20)
One archbishop wrote (p 20): Bellarmine asked the Jesuits for an opinion on Galileo, and the
learned fathers sent the most favorable letter you can think of Bellarmine was chief
theologian of the Church, and a Jesuit himself. Bellarmine wrote in a letter to A. Foscarini, 12
April 1615:
Third, I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and
the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the
sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear
contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.
But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown me.
(Quote from Feldhay, Galileo and the Church, Cambridge, 1995, page 35)
This was far from a mindless rejection of the Copernican pictureit just demanded a more
convincing demonstration.
Somewhat earlierDec 1613Galileo had written a letter to Castelli (a Benedictine abbot and
former pupil of Galileos) saying in essence that Scripture cannot contradict what we see in
nature, so scripture, written for the business of saving souls and readable by everybody,
sometimes is metaphorical in describing nature. It seems that Bellarmine and Galileo might have
been able to come to some agreement on a world view.
Incidentally, Galileo was thinking about quite a different series of physics problems at this same
time-trying to understand when things will float and when they sink. He believed Archimedes
Principle, that denser objects than water sink in water. (To be precise, the Principle states that
the buoyant supporting force from the water on an immersed object is equal to the weight of the

water displaced by the object. That is, it is equal to the weight of a volume of water equal to the
volume of the object. So if the object is denser than water, its weight is greater than the
buoyancy force and it sinks.)
It was pointed out to him that a ball made of ebony sinks in water, but a flat chip of ebony floats.
We now understand this in terms of surface tension, but that had not been understood in
Galileos time. Nevertheless, Galileo gave an essentially correct answer: he observed that the
chip floated somewhat below the previous level of the surface, dragging the water down slightly
around its edges, so one should consider the floating body to be the chip plus the thin sheet of
air over it, and putting these together gives an average density equal to that of water. Galileo
discussed problems of this kind with a Florentine patrician, Filippo Salviati, and a group of his
acquaintances. As usual, Galileos style and ability to pulverize the opposition did not win many
friends. (see Drake, pages 49-51). Salviati appears as one of the three disputants in Galileos
Dialogue.
One more source of tension between Galileo and the Jesuits arose at this point. Since 1611,
Galileo had been observing the motion of sunspots: small dark spots on the surface of the sun,
easily visible through a telescope at sunset. They were observed independently at about the same
time by Christopher Scheiner, a German Jesuit from Ingoldstadt. (It is possible that Scheiner had
somehow heard of Galileos observations.) Scheiner thought they were small dark objects
circling the sun at some distance, Galileo correctly surmised they were actually on the suns
surface, another blow to the perfect incorruptibility of a heavenly body. Galileo published his
findings in 1613, with a preface asserting his priority of discovery. This greatly upset Scheiner.
About this time, some members of another order of the Church, the Dominicans, were becoming
aware of the Copernican world view, and began to preach against it. In 1613, Father Nicolo
Lorini, a professor of ecclesiastical history in Florence, inveighed against the new astronomy, in
particular Ipernicus. (Sant p 25). He wrote a letter of apology after being reproved. In 1614,
another Dominican, Father Tommaso Caccini, who had previously been reprimanded for rabblerousing, preached a sermon with the text Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into the
heaven? He attacked mathematicians, and in particular Copernicus. (In the popular mind,
mathematician tended to mean astrologer.) It should be added that these two were by no means
representative of the order as a whole. The Dominican Preacher General, Father Luigi Maraffi,
wrote Galileo an apology, saying unfortunately I have to answer for all the idiocies that thirty or
forty thousand brothers may or actually do commit.
According to De Santillana (page 45) in 1615 Father Lorini sends an altered copy of Galileos
letter to Castelli (mentioned above) to the Inquisition. He made two changes, one of which was
to go from There are in scripture words which, taken in the strictly literal meaning, look as if
they differ from the truth to which are false in the literal meaning. Still, the inquisitor who
read it thought it passable, although open to being misconstrued.

Nevertheless, in February 1616, the Copernican System was condemned. According to Drake
(page 63): A principal area of contention between Catholics and Protestants was freedom to
interpret the Bible, which meant that any new Catholic interpretation could be used by the
Protestants as leverage: if one reinterpretation could be made, why not wholesale
reinterpretations? A dispute between the Dominicans and the Jesuits over certain issues of free
will was still fresh in the popes mind, as he had to take action in 1607 to stop members of the
two great teaching orders from hurling charges of heresy at each other. These things suggest that
Paul V, if not temperamentally anti-intellectual, had formed a habit of nipping in the bud any
intellectual dispute that might grow into factionalism within the Church and become a source of
strength for the contentions of the Protestants.
The pope asked Bellarmine to convey the ruling against the Copernican system to Galileo.
Bellarmine had a meeting with Galileo, and apparently there were also some Dominicans
present. Just what happened at this meeting is not quite clear, at least to me. Later (in May)
Galileo was given an affidavit by Bellarmine stating that he must no longer hold or defend the
propositions that the earth moves and the sun doesnt. Another document, however, which was
unsigned (and therefore perhaps of questionable accuracy), stated that the Commissary of the
Inquisition, in the name of the pope, ordered that Galileo could no longer hold, defend or teach
the two propositions (Drake, page 67). This second document was not given to Galileo. The
inclusion of teach was a crucial difference-it meant Galileo couldnt even describe the
Copernican system. A week later (early March) books describing a moving earth were placed on
the Index of Prohibited Books, some pending correction.
In the fall of 1618, three comets appeared. A book by a prominent Jesuit argued that the comets
followed orbits close to those of planets, although they had short lifetimes. Galileo knew the
comets moved in almost straight line motion much of the time. As usual, Galileo could not
conceal his contempt of the incorrect views of others:
In Sarsi I seem to discern the belief that in philosophizing one must support oneself on the
opinion of some celebrated author, as if our minds ought to remain completely sterile and barren
unless wedded to the reasoning of someone else. Possibly he thinks that philosophy is a book of
fiction by some author, like the Iliad . Well, Sarsi, that is not how things are. Philosophy is
written in this grand book of the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the
book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and to read the
alphabet in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its
characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly
impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders in a dark labyrinth.
(This is from The Assayer, 1623)
Naturally, this further alienated the Jesuits.

In 1623, Galileos admirer the Florentine Maffeo Barberini becomes Pope Urban VIII. The new
pope saw himself as a widely educated man, who appreciated even Galileos current theories.
He had written a poem In Dangerous Adulation about Galileos ideas. He also suggests his
own pet theory to Galileo: even though the universe may be most simply understood by thinking
of the sun at rest, God could have arranged it that way, but really with the earth at rest.
Galileo felt that with his friend and admirer as pope, and his affidavit from Bellarmine that didnt
actually forbid him from describing the Copernican system, it was safe to write further about his
world view. His ambition was to prove that the Copernican system must be correct, even though
the more cumbersome Ptolemaic system might be fixed up to describe observations. (For
example, the Danish Astronomer Tycho Brahe suggested that the sun went around the earth, but
all the other planets went around the sun. That would account correctly for the phases of Venus.)
Galileo was searching for some real proof that the earth was moving. He thought he found it in
the tides. Why should all the water on the surface of the earth slosh around once or twice a day?
Galileo decided it was because the earth was both rotating and moving around the sun, so for a
given place on earth, its speed varies throughout the day, depending on whether its speed from
the daily rotation is in the same direction as its speed from the earths moving around the sun.
This constant speeding up and slowing down is what Galileo thought generated the tides, so the
tides were proof the earth was moving! (Actually this is not a good argument-the tides are really
caused by the moons gravity.)
Galileo worked on his new book, which he intended to call Dialogue on the Tides, from 1624
to 1630. He was warned as he completed the work that that title seemed to imply he really held
the view that the earth was moving, so he changed the title to Dialogue Concerning the Two
Chief Systems of the World-Ptolemaic and Copernican. As usual, Galileo spared no-one in the
book. He mocked the pope himself, by putting Urbans suggestion (see above) in the mouth of
Simplicio, then dismissing it contemptuously (Reston, page 195).
The book was published in March 1632 in Florence. In August, an order came from the
Inquisition in Rome to stop publication, and Galileo was ordered to stand trial. Apparently,
someoneprobably Scheiner, now living in Romehad shown the pope the unsigned memo
from the 1616 meeting, forbidding Galileo even to describe the Copernican system. Galileo was
not too upset at the thought of a trial, because he held a trump card: the affidavit from
Bellarmine. At the trial, Galileo said he had no memory of being forbidden to teach, and no
signed document could be found to support the unsigned memo.
The trial did not address the scientific merits of the case, it was about whether or not Galileo had
disobeyed an official order. It was suggested that he admit to some wrongdoing, and he would
get off lightly. He agreed to tone down the Dialogue, pleading that he had been carried away by
his own arguments. He was condemned to indefinite imprisonment, and, after some negotiation,

was confined to his villa until his death in 1642. During this period, he wrote Two New Sciences,
a book on the strength of materials and on the science of motion.
Galileo wrote in his old age, in his own copy of the Dialogue:
Take note, theologians, that in your desire to make matters of faith out of propositions relating to
the fixity of sun and earth, you run the risk of eventually having to condemn as heretics those
who would declare the earth to stand still and the sun to change position-eventually, I say, at
such a time as it might be physically or logically proved that the earth moves and the sun stands
still.
(Quoted in Drake, page 62).
Its perhaps worth adding one last word from the Jesuits (Reston, page 273) :
If Galileo had only known how to retain the favor of the fathers of this college, he would have
stood in renown before the world; he would have been spared all his misfortunes, and could
have written about everything, even about the motion of the earth.
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Scaling: Why Giants Dont Exist

Michael Fowler, UVa 10/12/06

Galileo begins Two New Sciences with the striking observation that if two ships, one large and one small,
have identical proportions and are constructed of the same materials, so that one is purely a scaled up version
of the other in every respect, nevertheless the larger one will require proportionately more scaffolding and
support on launching to prevent its breaking apart under its own weight. He goes on to point out that similar
considerations apply to animals, the larger ones being more vulnerable to stress from their own weight (page
4):

Who does not know that a horse falling from a height of three or four cubits will break his
bones, while a dog falling from the same height or a cat from a height of eight or ten cubits

will suffer no injury? ... and just as smaller animals are proportionately stronger and more
robust than the larger, so also smaller plants are able to stand up better than the larger. I am
certain you both know that an oak two hundred cubits high would not be able to sustain its
own branches if they were distributed as in a tree of ordinary size; and that nature cannot
produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary
man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially his
bones, which would have to be considerably enlarged over the ordinary.

For more of the text, click here.

To see what Galileo is driving at here, consider a chandelier lighting fixture, with bulbs and shades on a
wooden frame suspended from the middle of the ceiling by a thin rope, just sufficient to take its weight
(taking the electrical supply wires to have negligible strength for this purpose). Suppose you like the design
of this particular fixture, and would like to make an exactly similar one for a room twice as large in every
dimension. The obvious approach is simply to double the dimensions of all components. Assuming
essentially all the weight is in the wooden frame, its height, length and breadth will all be doubled, so its
volumeand hence its weightwill increase eightfold. Now think about the rope between the chandelier
and the ceiling. The new rope will be eight times bigger than the old rope just as the wooden frame was. But
the weight-bearing capacity of a uniform rope does not depend on its length (unless it is so long that its own
weight becomes important, which we take not to be the case here). How much weight a rope of given
material will bear depends on the cross-sectional area of the rope, which is just a count of the number of rope
fibers available to carry the weight. The crucial point is that if the rope has all its dimensions doubled, this
cross-sectional area, and hence its weight-carrying capacity, is only increased fourfold. Therefore, the
doubled rope will not be able to hold up the doubled chandelier, the weight of which increased eightfold. For
the chandelier to stay up, it will be necessary to use a new rope which is considerably fatter than that given by
just doubling the dimensions of the original rope.

This same problem arises when a weight is supported by a pillar of some kind. If enough weight is piled on
to a stone pillar, it begins to crack and crumble. For a uniform material, the weight it can carry is
proportional to the cross-sectional area. Thinking about doubling all the dimensions of a stone building
supported on stone pillars, we see that the weights are all increased eightfold, but the supporting capacities
only go up fourfold. Obviously, there is a definite limit to how many times the dimensions can be doubled
and we still have a stable building.

As Galileo points out, this all applies to animals and humans too (page 130): (large) increase in height can
be accomplished only by employing a material which is harder and stronger than usual, or by enlarging the

size of the bones, thus changing their shape until the form and appearance of the animals suggests a
monstrosity.

He even draws a picture:

Galileo understood that you cannot have a creature looking a lot like an ordinary gorilla except that its sixty
feet high. What about Harry Potters friend Hagrid? Apparently hes twice normal height (according to the
book) and three times normal width (although he doesnt look it on this link). But even thats not enough
extra width (if the bone width is in proportion).

There is a famous essay on this point by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, in which he talks of the more
venerable giants in Pilgrims Progress, who were ten times bigger than humans in every dimension, so their
weight would have been a thousand times larger, say eighty tons or so. As Haldane says, their thighbones
would only have a hundred times the cross section of a human thighbone, which is known to break if stressed
by ten times the weight it normally carries. So these giants would break their thighbones on their first step.
Or course, big creatures could get around this if they could evolve a stronger skeletal material, but so far this
hasnt happened.

Another example of the importance of size used by Galileo comes from considering a round stone falling
through water at its terminal speed. What happens if we consider a stone of the same material and shape, but

one-tenth the radius? It falls much more slowly. Its weight is down by a factor of one-thousand, but the
surface area, which gives rise to the frictional retardation, is only down by a factor of one hundred. Thus a
fine powder in water---mud, in other words---may take days to settle, even though a stone of the same
material will fall the same distance in a second or two. The point here is that as we look on smaller scales,
gravity becomes less and less important compared with viscosity, or air resistancethis is why an insect is
not harmed by falling from a tree.

This ratio of surface area to volume has also played a crucial role in evolution, as pointed out by Haldane.
Almost all life is made up of cells which have quite similar oxygen requirements. A microscopic creature,
such as the tiny worm rotifer, absorbs oxygen over its entire surface, and the oxygen rapidly diffuses to all the
cells. As larger creatures evolved, if the shape stayed the same more or less, the surface area went down
relative to the volume, so it became more difficult to absorb enough oxygen. Insects, for example, have
many tiny blind tubes over the surface of their bodies which air enters and diffuses into finer tubes to reach
all parts of the body. The limitations on how well air will diffuse are determined by the properties of air, and
diffusion beyond a quarter-inch or so takes a long time, so this limits the size of insects. Giant ants like those
in the old movie Them wouldnt be able to breathe!

The evolutionary breakthrough to larger size animals came with the development of blood circulation as a
means of distributing oxygen (and other nutrients). Even so, for animals of our size, there has to be a
tremendous surface area available for oxygen absorption. This was achieved by the development of lungs
the lungs of an adult human have a surface area of a hundred square meters approximately. Going back to the
microscopic worm rotifer, it has a simple straight tube gut to absorb nutrients from food. Again, if larger
creatures have about the same requirements per cell, and the gut surface absorbs nutrients at the same rate,
problems arise because the surface area of the gut increases more slowly than the number of cells needing to
be fed as the size of the creature is increased. this problem is handled by replacing the straight tube gut by
one with many convolutions, in which also the smooth surface is replaced by one with many tiny folds to
increase surface area. Thus many of the complications of internal human anatomy can be understood as
strategies that have evolved for increasing available surface area per cell for oxygen and nutrient absorption
towards what it is for simpler but much smaller creatures.

On the other hand, there is some good news about being bigit makes it feasible to maintain a constant body
temperature. This has several advantages. For example, it is easier to evolve efficient muscles if they are
only required to function in a narrow range of temperatures than if they must perform well over a wide range
of temperatures. However, this temperature control comes at a price. Warm blooded creatures (unlike
insects) must devote a substantial part of their food energy simply to keeping warm. For an adult human, this
is a pound or two of food per day. For a mouse, which has about one-twentieth the dimensions of a human,
and hence twenty times the surface area per unit volume, the required food for maintaining the same body
temperature is twenty times as much as a fraction of body weight, and a mouse must consume a quarter of its

own body weight daily just to stay warm. This is why, in the arctic land of Spitzbergen, the smallest mammal
is the fox.

How high can a giant flea jump? Suppose we know that a regular flea can jump to a height of three feet, and
a giant flea is one hundred times larger in all dimensions, so its weight is up by a factor of a million. Its
amount of muscle is also up by a factor of a million, and when it jumps it rapidly transforms chemical energy
stored in the muscle into kinetic energy, which then goes to gravitational potential energy on the upward
flight. But the amount of energy stored in the muscle and the weight to be lifted are up by the same factor, so
we conclude that the giant flea can also jump three feet! We can also use this argument in reversea
shrunken human (as in I shrunk the kids) could jump the same height as a normal human, again about three
feet, say. So the tiny housewife trapped in her kitchen sink in the movie could have just jumped out, which
shed better do fast, because shes probably very hungry!

Question: from The Economist, Sept 16, 1995 page 74: "the average 16-year-old Japanese girl has grown
4% heavier since 1975, although she is only 1% taller." Just how much plumper does she look? What
percent increase would keep her shape exactly the same?
_______________________________________________________________________________

Teaching note: I began the lecture with five questions in a powerpoint presentation, to be answered using
clickers. The idea was to get the class thinking about how areas and volumes increase when an object
increases in size, keeping the same proportions. To understand how doubling the diameter of a circle
increases its area fourfold, imagine the circle just fitting inside a square. Its obvious what happens for
squaresand also that the circle takes up the same percentage of the squares area no matter what size they
are, provided it just fits. Then a cube, and a ball in a cubical box. Think first about a 2x2x2 cube made of a
childs cubical building blocks. Visualize both volume and area increase from 1x1x1.

The last two questions were asked later, at the appropriate point in the class.
____________________________________________________________________________

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Galileos Acceleration Experiment

Michael Fowler, UVa Physics Department

Summarizing Aristotles View

Aristotle held that there are two kinds of motion for inanimate matter, natural and unnatural.
Unnatural (or violent) motion is when something is being pushed, and in this case the speed of
motion is proportional to the force of the push. (This was probably deduced from watching
oxcarts and boats.) Natural motion is when something is seeking its natural place in the universe,
such as a stone falling, or fire rising. (We are only talking here about substances composed of
earth, water, air and fire, the natural circular motion of the planets, composed of aither, is
considered separately).
For the natural motion of heavy objects falling to earth, Aristotle asserted that the speed of fall
was proportional to the weight, and inversely proportional to the density of the medium the body
was falling through. He did also mention that there was some acceleration, as the body
approached more closely its own element, its weight increased and it speeded up. However, these
remarks in Aristotle are very brief and vague, and certainly not quantitative.
Actually, these views of Aristotle did not go unchallenged even in ancient Athens. Thirty years or
so after Aristotles death, Strato pointed out that a stone dropped from a greater height had a
greater impact on the ground, suggesting that the stone picked up more speed as it fell from the
greater height.

Two New Sciences

Galileo set out his ideas about falling bodies, and about projectiles in general, in a book called
Two New Sciences. The two were the science of motion, which became the foundation-stone of
physics, and the science of materials and construction, an important contribution to engineering.
The ideas are presented in lively fashion as a dialogue involving three characters, Salviati,
Sagredo and Simplicio. The official Church point of view, that is, Aristotelianism, is put forward
by the character called Simplicio, and usually demolished by the others. Galileos defense when
accused of heresy in a similar book was that he was just setting out all points of view, but this is
somewhat disingenuous---Simplicio is almost invariably portrayed as simpleminded.
For example, on TNS page 62, Salviati states:

I greatly doubt that Aristotle ever tested by experiment whether it be true that two stones, one
weighing ten times as much as the other, if allowed to fall, at the same instant, from a height of,
say, 100 cubits, would so differ in speed that when the heavier had reached the ground, the other
would not have fallen more than 10 cubits.
Simplicios response to this is not to think in terms of doing the experiment himself to respond to
Salviatis challenge, but to scrutinize more closely the holy writ:
SIMP: His language would seem to indicate that he had tried the experiment, because he says:
We see the heavier; now the word see shows he had made the experiment.
Sagredo then joins in:
SAGR: But I, Simplicio, who have made the test, can assure you that a cannon ball weighing one
or two hundred pounds, or even more, will not reach the ground by as much as a span ahead of a
musket ball weighing only half a pound, provided both are dropped from a height of 200 cubits.
This then marks the beginning of the modern era in science---the attitude that assertions about
the physical world by authorities, no matter how wise or revered, stand or fall by experimental
test. Legend has it that Galileo performed this particular experiment from the leaning tower of
Pisa.
Galileo goes on to give a detailed analysis of falling bodies. He realizes that for extremely light
objects, such as feathers, the air resistance becomes the dominant effect, whereas it makes only a
tiny difference in the experiment outlined above.

Naturally Accelerated Motion

Having established experimentally that heavy objects fall at practically the same rate, Galileo
went on to consider the central question about speed of fall barely touched on by Aristotle---how
does the speed vary during the fall?
The problem is that its very difficult to answer this question by just watching something fall--its all over too fast. To make any kind of measurement of the speed, the motion must somehow
be slowed down. Of course, some falling motions are naturally slow, such as a feather, or
something not too heavy falling through water. Watching these motions, one sees that after being
dropped the body rapidly gains a definite speed, then falls steadily at that speed. The mistake
people had been making was in assuming that all falling bodies followed this same pattern, so
that most of the fall was at a steady speed. Galileo argued that this point of view was false by
echoing the forgotten words of Strato almost two thousand years earlier:

(TNS, page 163) But tell me, gentlemen, is it not true that if a block be allowed to fall upon a
stake from a height of four cubits and drive it into the earth, say, four finger-breadths, that
coming from a height of two cubits it will drive the stake a much less distance; and finally if the
block be lifted only one finger-breadth how much more will it accomplish than if merely laid on
top of the stake without percussion? Certainly very little. If it be lifted only the thickness of a
leaf, the effect will be altogether imperceptible. And since the effect of the blow depends upon the
velocity of this striking body, can any one doubt the motion is very slow .. whenever the effect is
imperceptible?

Galileos Acceleration Hypothesis

Having established by the above arguments and experiments that a falling body continues to pick
up speed, or accelerate, as it falls, Galileo suggested the simplest possible hypothesis
(paraphrasing the discussion on TNS page 161):
A falling body accelerates uniformly: it picks up equal amounts of speed in equal time intervals,
so that, if it falls from rest, it is moving twice as fast after two seconds as it was moving after one
second, and moving three times as fast after three seconds as it was after one second.
This is an appealingly simple hypothesis, but not so easy for Galileo to check by experiment--how could he measure the speed of a falling stone twice during the fall and make the
comparison?

Slowing Down the Motion

The trick is to slow down the motion somehow so that speeds can be measured, without at the
same time altering the character of the motion. Galileo knew that dropping something through
water that fell fairly gently did alter the character of the motion, it would land as gently on the
bottom dropped from ten feet as it did from two feet, so slowing down the motion by dropping
something through water changed things completely.
Galileos idea for slowing down the motion was to have a ball roll down a ramp rather than to
fall vertically. He argued that the speed gained in rolling down a ramp of given height didnt
depend on the slope. His argument was based on an experiment with a pendulum and a nail,
shown on page 171 of Two New Sciences. The pendulum consists of a thread and a lead bullet. It
is drawn aside, the string taut, to some point C.

A nail is placed at E directly below the top end of the thread, so that as the pendulum swings
through its lowest point, the thread hits the nail and the pendulum is effectively shortened, so that
the bullet swings up more steeply, to G with the nail at E. Nevertheless, the pendulum will be
seen to swing back up to almost the same height it started at, that is, the points G and C are the
same height above level ground. Furthermore, when it swings back, it gets up as far as point C
again, if we neglect a slight loss caused by air resistance. From this we can conclude that the
speed with which the ball passes through the lowest point is the same in both directions. To see
this, imagine first the situation without the nail at E. The ball would swing backwards and
forwards in a symmetrical way, an ordinary pendulum, and certainly in this case the speed at the
lowest point is the same for both directions (again ignoring gradual slowing down from air
resistance). When we do put the nail in, though, we see from the experiment that on the swing
back, the ball still manages to get to the beginning point C. We conclude that it must have been
going the same speed as it swung back through the lowest point as when the nail wasnt there,
because the instant it leaves the nail on the return swing it is just an ordinary pendulum, and how
far it swings out from the vertical depends on how fast its moving at the lowest point.
Galileo argues that a similar pattern will be observed if a ball rolls down a ramp which is
smoothly connected to another steeper upward ramp, that is, the ball will roll up the second ramp
to a level essentially equal to the level it started at, even though the two ramps have different
slopes. It will then continue to roll backwards and forwards between the two ramps, eventually
coming to rest because of friction, air resistance, etc.

Thinking about this motion, it is clear that (ignoring the gradual slowing down on successive
passes) it must be going the same speed coming off one ramp as it does coming off the other.
Galileo then suggests we imagine the second ramp steeper and steeper---and we see that if its

steep enough, we can think of the ball as just falling! He concludes that for a ball rolling down a
ramp, the speed at various heights is the same as the speed the ball would have attained (much
more quickly!) by just falling vertically from its starting point to that height. But if we make the
ramp gentle enough, the motion will be slow enough to measure. (Actually, there is a difference
between a rolling ball and a smoothly sliding or falling ball, but it does not affect the pattern of
increase of speed, so we will not dwell on it here.)

Galileos Acceleration Experiment

We are now ready to consider Galileos experiment in which he tested his hypothesis about the
way falling bodies gain speed. We quote the account from Two New Sciences, page 178:
A piece of wooden moulding or scantling, about 12 cubits long, half a cubit wide, and three
finger-breadths thick, was taken; on its edge was cut a channel a little more than one finger in
breadth; having made this groove very straight, smooth, and polished, and having lined it with
parchment, also as smooth and polished as possible, we rolled along it a hard, smooth, and very
round bronze ball. Having placed this board in a sloping position, by raising one end some one
or two cubits above the other, we rolled the ball, as I was just saying, along the channel, noting,
in a manner presently to be described, the time required to make the descent. We repeated this
experiment more than once in order to measure the time with an accuracy such that the deviation
between two observations never exceeded one-tenth of a pulse-beat. Having performed this
operation and having assured ourselves of its reliability, we now rolled the ball only one-quarter
the length of the channel; and having measured the time of its descent, we found it precisely onehalf of the former. Next we tried other distances, compared the time for the whole length with
that for the half, or with that for two-thirds, or three-fourths, or indeed for any fraction; in such
experiments, repeated a full hundred times, we always found that the spaces traversed were to
each other as the squares of the times, and this was true for all inclinations of the plane, i.e., of
the channel, along which we rolled the ball. We also observed that the times of descent, for
various inclinations of the plane, bore to one another precisely that ratio which, as we shall see
later, the Author had predicted and demonstrated for them.
For the measurement of time, we employed a large vessel of water placed in an elevated
position; to the bottom of this vessel was soldered a pipe of small diameter giving a thin jet of
water which we collected in a small glass during the time of each descent, whether for the whole
length of the channel or for part of its length; the water thus collected was weighed, after each
descent, on a very accurate balance; the differences and ratios of these weights gave us the
differences and ratios of the times, and this with such accuracy that although the operation was
repeated many, many times, there was no appreciable discrepancy in the results.

Actually Doing the Experiment

We did the experiment in class in October 1996. O.K., we didnt line the channel with
parchment, and we used an ordinary large steel ball (about one inch in diameter). We did use a
water clock, with a student letting a jet of water into a polystyrene(!) cup during the interval
between another student releasing the ball at some distance up the ramp and it hitting the stop at
the bottom. We performed the experiment three times for the full ramp, and three times for a
quarter of the distance. We weighed the amount of water in the cup with an ordinary balance. We
found, somewhat to our surprise, that the average amount for the full ramp was 56 grams, for the
quarter ramp 28 grams. This was partly luck, there was a scatter of a few grams. However, it
does suggest that Galileo was not exaggerating in his claims of accuracy in Two New Sciences,
since he was far more careful than we were, and repeated the experiment many more times.
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PDFNaturally

Accelerated Motion

Michael Fowler UVa Physics 10/09/08

Distance Covered in Uniform Acceleration

In the last lecture, we stated what we called Galileos acceleration hypothesis:
A falling body accelerates uniformly: it picks up equal amounts of speed in equal time intervals,
so that, if it falls from rest, it is moving twice as fast after two seconds as it was moving after one
second, and moving three times as fast after three seconds as it was after one second.
We also found, from the experiment, that a falling body will fall four times as far in twice the
time. That is to say, we found that the time to roll one-quarter of the way down the ramp was
one-half the time to roll all the way down.
Galileo asserted that the result of the rolling-down-the-ramp experiment confirmed his claim that
the acceleration was uniform. Let us now try to understand why this is so. The simplest way to
do this is to put in some numbers. Let us assume, for arguments sake, that the ramp is at a
convenient slope such that, after rolling down it for one second, the ball is moving at two meters
per second. This means that after two seconds it would be moving at four meters per second,

after three seconds at six meters per second and so on until it hits the end of the ramp. (Note: to
get an intuitive feel for these speeds, one meter per second is 3.6 km/hr, or 2.25 mph.)
To get a clear idea of whats happening, you should sketch a graph of how speed increases with
time. This is a straight line graph, beginning at zero speed at zero time, then going through a
point corresponding to two meters per second at time one second, four at two seconds and so on.
It sounds trivial, but is surprisingly helpful to have this graph in front of you as you readso,
find a piece of paper or an old envelope (this doesnt have to be too precise) and draw a line
along the bottom marked 0, 1, 2, for seconds of time, then a vertical line (or y-axis) indicating
speed at a given timethis could be marked 0, 2, 4, meters per second. Now, put in the points
(0,0), (1,2) and so on, and join them with a line.
From your graph, you can now read off its speed not just at 0, 1, 2 seconds, but at, say 1.5
seconds or 1.9 seconds or any other time within the time interval covered by the graph.
The hard part, though, is figuring out how far it moves in a given time. This is the core of
Galileos argument, and it is essential that you understand it before going further, so read the
next paragraphs slowly and carefully!
Let us ask a specific question: how far does it get in two seconds? If it were moving at a steady
speed of four meters per second for two seconds, it would of course move eight meters. But it
cant have gotten that far after two seconds, because it just attained the speed of four meters per
second when the time reached two seconds, so it was going at slower speeds up to that point. In
fact, at the very beginning, it was moving very slowly. Clearly, to figure out how far it travels
during that first two seconds what we must do is to find its average speed during that period.
This is where the assumption of uniform acceleration comes in. What it means is that the speed
starts from zero at the beginning of the period, increases at a constant rate, is two meters per
second after one second (half way through the period) and four meters per second after two
seconds, that is, at the end of the period we are considering. Notice that the speed is one meter
per second after half a second, and three meters per second after one-and-a-half seconds. From
the graph you should have drawn above of the speed as it varies in time, it should be evident that,
for this uniformly accelerated motion, the average speed over this two second interval is the
speed reached at half-time, that is, two meters per second.
Now, the distance covered in any time interval is equal to the average speed multiplied by the
time taken, so the distance traveled in two seconds is four metersthat is, two meters per second
for two seconds.
Now let us use the same argument to figure how far the ball rolls in just one second. At the end
of one second, it is moving at two meters per second. At the beginning of the second, it was at

rest. At the half-second point, the ball was moving at one meter per second. By the same
arguments as used above, then, the average speed during the first second was one meter per
second. Therefore, the total distance rolled during the first second is jus tone meter.
We can see from the above why, in uniform acceleration, the ball rolls four times as far when
the time interval doubles. If the average speed were the same for the two second period as for
the one second period, the distance covered would double since the ball rolls for twice as long a
time. But since the speed is steadily increasing, the average speed also doubles. It is the
combination of these two factorsmoving at twice the average speed for twice the timethat
gives the factor of four in distance covered!
It is not too difficult to show using these same arguments that the distances covered in 1, 2, 3,
4, ...seconds are proportional to 1, 4, 9, 16, .., that is, the squares of the times involved. This is
left as an exercise for the reader.

A Video Test of Galileos Hypothesis

In fact, using a video camera, we can check the hypothesis of uniform acceleration very directly
on a falling object. We drop the ball beside a meter stick with black and white stripes each ten
centimeters wide, so that on viewing the movie frame by frame, we can estimate where the ball
is at each frame. Furthermore, the camera has a built-in clockit films at thirty frames per
second. Therefore, we can constantly monitor the speed by measuring how many centimeters the
ball drops from one frame to the next. Since this measures distance traveled in one-thirtieth of a
second, we must multiply the distance dropped between frames by thirty to get the (average)
speed in that short time interval in centimeters per second.
By systematically going through all the frames showing the ball falling, and finding the
(average) speed for each time interval, we were able to draw a graph of speed against time. It
was a little rough, a result of our crude measuring of distance, but it was clear that speed was
increasing with time at a steady rate, and in fact we could measure the rate by finding the speed
reached after, say half a second. We found that, approximately, the rate of increase of speed was
ten meters (1,000 cms) per second in each second of fall, so after half a second it was moving at
about five meters per second, and after a quarter of a second it was going two and a half meters
per second.
This rate of increase of speed is the same for all falling bodies, neglecting the effect of air
resistance (and buoyancy for extremely light bodies such as balloons). It is called the
acceleration due to gravity, written g, and is actually close to 9.8 meters per second per second.
However, we shall take it to be 10 for convenience.

Throwing a Ball Upwards

To clarify ideas on the acceleration due to gravity, it is worth thinking about throwing a ball
vertically upwards. If we made another movie, we would find that the motion going upwards is
like a mirror image of that on the way down-the distances traveled between frames on the way
up get shorter and shorter. In fact, the ball on its way up loses speed at a steady rate, and the rate
turns out to be ten meters per second per second-the same as the rate of increase on the way
down. For example, if we throw the ball straight upwards at 20 meters per second (about 40
mph) after one second it will have slowed to 10 meters per second, and after two seconds it will
be at rest momentarily before beginning to come down. After a total of four seconds, it will be
back where it started.
An obvious question so: how high did it go? The way to approach this is to find its average
speed on the way up and multiply it by the time taken to get up. As before, it is helpful to sketch
a graph of how the speed is varying with time. The speed at the initial time is 20 meters per
second, at one second its down to 10, then at two seconds its zero. It is clear from the graph
that the average speed on the way up is 10 meters per second, and since it takes two seconds to
get up, the total distance traveled must be 20 meters.

Speed and Velocity

Let us now try to extend our speed plot to keep a record of the entire fall. The speed drops to
zero when the ball reaches the top, then begins to increase again. We could represent this by a Vshaped curve, but it turns out to be more natural to introduce the idea of velocity. Unfortunately
velocity and speed mean the same thing in ordinary usage, but in science velocity means more: it
includes speed and direction. In the case of a ball going straight up and down, we include
direction by saying that motion upwards has positive velocity, motion downwards has negative
velocity.
If we now plot the velocity of the ball at successive times, it is +20 initially, +10 after one
second, 0 after two seconds, -10 after three seconds, -20 after four seconds. If you plot this on a
graph you will see that it is all on the same straight line. Over each one-second interval, the
velocity decreases by ten meters per second throughout the flight. In other words, the
acceleration due to gravity is -10 meters per second per second, or you could say it is 10 meters
per second per second downwards.

Whats the Acceleration at the Topmost Point?

Most people on being asked that for the first time say zero. Thats wrong. But to see why takes
some clear thinking about just what is meant by velocity and acceleration. Recall Zeno claimed
motion was impossible because at each instant of time an object has to be in a particular position,
and since an interval of time is made up of instants, it could never move. The catch is that a

second of time cannot be built up of instants. It can, however, be built up of intervals of time
each as short as you wish. Average velocity over an interval of time is defined by dividing the
distance moved in that interval by the time taken---the length of the interval. We define velocity
at an instant of time, such as the velocity of the ball when the time is one second, by taking a
small time interval which includes the time one second, finding the average velocity over that
time interval, then repeating the process with smaller and smaller time intervals to home in on
the answer.
Now, to find acceleration at an instant of time we have to go through the same process.
Remember, acceleration is rate of change of velocity. So, to find the acceleration at an instant we
have to take some short but non-zero time interval that includes the point in question and find
how much the velocity changes during that time interval. Then we divide that velocity change
by the time it took to find the acceleration, in, say, meters per second per second.
The point is that at the topmost point of the throw, the ball does come to rest for an instant.
Before and after that instant, there is a brief period where the velocity is so small it looks as if the
ball is at rest. Also, our eyes tend to lock on the ball, so there is an illusion that the ball has zero
velocity for a short but non-zero period of time. But this isnt the case. The balls velocity is
always changing. To find its acceleration at the topmost point, we have to find how its velocity
changes in a short time interval which includes that point. If we took, for example, a period of
one-thousandth of a second, we would find the velocity to have changed by one centimeter per
second. So the ball would fall one two-thousandth of a centimeter during that first thousandth of
a second from rest-not too easy to see! The bottom line, though, is that the acceleration of the
ball is 10 meters per second per second downwards throughout the flight.
If you still find yourself thinking its got no acceleration at the top, maybe youre confusing
velocity with acceleration. All these words are used rather loosely in everyday life, but we are
forced to give them precise meanings to discuss motion unambiguously. In fact, lack of clarity
of definitions like this delayed understanding of these things for centuries.

The Motion of Projectiles

We follow fairly closely here the discussion of Galileo in Two New Sciences, Fourth Day, from
page 244 to the middle of page 257.
To analyze how projectiles move, Galileo describes two basic types of motion:
(i) Naturally accelerated vertical motion, which is the motion of a vertically falling body that we
have already discussed in detail.
(ii) Uniform horizontal motion, which he defines as straight-line horizontal motion which covers
equal distances in equal times.

This uniform horizontal motion, then, is just the familiar one of an automobile going at a steady
speed on a straight freeway. Galileo puts it as follows:
Imagine any particle projected along a horizontal plane without friction; then we know...that
this particle will move along this same plane with a motion that is uniform and perpetual,
provided the plane has no limits.
This simple statement is in itself a substantial advance on Aristotle, who thought that an
inanimate object could only continue to move as long as it was being pushed. Galileo realized
the crucial role played by friction: if there is no friction, he asserted, the motion will continue
indefinitely. Aristotles problem in this was that he observed friction-dominated systems, like
oxcarts, where motion stopped almost immediately when the ox stopped pulling. Recall that
Galileo, in the rolling a ball down a ramp experiment, went to great pains to get the ramp very
smooth, the ball very round, hard and polished. He knew that only in this way could he get
reliable, reproducible results. At the same time, it must have been evident to him that if the ramp
were to be laid flat, the ball would roll from one end to the other, after an initial push, with very
little loss of speed.

Compound Motion
Galileo introduces projectile motion by imagining that a ball, rolling in uniform horizontal
motion across a smooth tabletop, flies off the edge of the table. He asserts that when this
happens, the particles horizontal motion will continue at the same uniform rate, but, in addition,
it will acquire a downward vertical motion identical to that of any falling body. He refers to this
as a compound motion.

The simplest way to see what is going on is to study Galileos diagram on page 249, which we
reproduce here. For an animation, click here ! .
Imagine the ball to have been rolling across a tabletop moving to the left, passing the point a and
then going off the edge at the point b. Galileos figure shows its subsequent position at three
equal time intervals, say, 0.1 seconds, 0.2 seconds and 0.3 seconds after leaving the table, when
it will be at i, f, and h respectively.
The first point to notice is that the horizontal distance it has travelled from the table increases
uniformly with time: bd is just twice bc, and so on. That is to say, its horizontal motion is just
the same as if it had stayed on the table.
The second point is that its vertical motion is identical to that of a vertically falling body. In
other words, if another ball had been dropped vertically from b at the instant that our ball flew
off the edge there, they would always be at the same vertical height, so after 0.1 seconds when
the first ball reaches i, the dropped ball has fallen to o, and so on. It also follows, since we know
the falling body falls four times as far if the time is doubled, that bg is four times bo, so for the
projectile fd is four times ic. This can be stated in a slightly different way, which is the way
Galileo formulated it to prove the curve was a parabola:

The ratio of the vertical distances dropped in two different times, for example bg/bo, is always
the square of the ratio of the horizontal distances travelled in those times, in this case fg/io.
You can easily check that this is always true, from the rule of uniform acceleration of a falling
body. For example, bl is nine times bo, and hl is three times io.
Galileo proved, with a virtuoso display of Greek geometry, that the fact that the vertical drop was
proportional to the square of the horizontal distance meant that the trajectory was a parabola.
His definition of a parabola, the classic Greek definition, was that it was the intersection of a
cone with a plane parallel to one side of the cone. Starting from this definition of a parabola, it
takes quite a lot of work to establish that the trajectory is parabolic. However, if we define a
parabola as a curve of the form y = Cx then of course weve proved it already!
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