Okay gang, lets roll.

And welcome back to Analyzing the

Universe.
Today I want to talk to you about a big
problem that astronomy has.
And that is determining the mass of
astronomical objects.
You see astronomy has a big disadvantage
when it comes to analysis in general.
Why?
Because we can't change things.
Unlike a terrestrial physics or chemistry
lab, where one
vary many conditions that might affect a
given experiment.
Such as voltage, or PH, or a magnetic
field.
In astronomy, we have to accept the
experiments that nature gives us.
Thus, fundamental quantities that we take
for granted on the Earth,
such as the mass of an object and its
distance away from
us, become exciting challenges for us in
the celestial realm.
Why is the determination of mass so
challenging?
Primarily it's because gravity is such a
weak force.
And the only means by which astronomically
sized objects can be measured.
Let's examine this in detail.
To do this we travel back in time, and
visit Europe in the
17th Century.
As we shall soon see, time itself was part
of the problem.
Galileo, and then Newton, were hard at
work.
The Holy Grail of the nature of forces in
motion was being sought.
But what is a force?
And on what does it depend?
Aristotle chimed in first, noting that if
a force,
or impetus as it was called, was stopped,
the
object to which the force was applied also
stopped.
So, it was obvious, the natural state of
an object was at rest.
Thus, force Is proportional to velocity,
force
must be proportional to the velocity,
since even to maintain a constant
speed, you seemed to need a force.
And so
an error propagated down through the
centuries, until the great
Galileo in a brilliant series of

experiments involving incline

planes put forward the positively absurd
notion
that an object could move forever at a
constant velocity with
no force applied at all.
Uniform, perpetual motion was
indeed possible.
In the absence of a force, the velocity
of an object would not go to zero.
But stay constant.
How did he show this?
Galileo noticed the following.
If you have a ball on an inclined plane
and
the ball rolls down the plane, it always
goes back to the same
height when it rolls back up the plane.
Always
to the same height as it started.
Now, look and see what he did.
If the ball rolls down the plane.
And now the plane has a slightly different
angle.
It will roll further along the plane.
Back to the same height as
it was initially and you can see where
he's going with this now.
The ball rolls down the plane.
And now, the plane goes up like this,
here's the height the ball
rolls down, the ball rolls over, all the
way over to here, and
now for the piece de resistance, he rolls
the ball
down the plane, and now instead of having
any angle at all.
That has an upward swing, you can now
imagine that if
you get that ball rolling all along a
plane that's
exactly horizontal it will never
ever stop.
Even Galileo commented that this seems
hard to
believe Yet this is what his experiments
showed.
And is one of the first to usher in the
scientific age, he believed that the
universe must be examined in the light of
data, and not understood according to
pronunciations by authorities.
Be they philosopher like
Aristotle, or theologians like Pope Paul
V.
And so this simple idea, experimentally
determined,
that motion could be maintained in the
absence
of a force Finally led Newton to

the understanding that force was

proportional to acceleration.
Force is
proportional to acceleration, and mass as
the
resistance to motion completes the idea of
inertia.
But what about all those little arrows?
What do they mean, and why are they
important?
To understand this, we need to take a
little side street down the road marked
vectors.
What is a vector?
It is nothing more than a mathematical
quantity, a number.
That has a direction associated with it.
The quantity is indicated
by a length.
This being a small quantity, this being a
medium sized one, this being a fairly
substantial
length.
The direction is indicated by an
arrowhead.
So, if this quantity is pointed in that
direction, we draw an arrowhead there.
If this quantity
is drawn in this direction, we have an
arrowhead there.
And if this quantity has a direction
associated in
this fashion, we draw the arrowhead over
in that
position.
Thus, two vectors, A and B,
are identical as long as their lengths and
their directions
are the same.
So if this is vector A.
This can be vector B, looks pretty good.
You might have to use a little bit of
imagination there.
But the fact that they are written in
a different part of the blackboard is
irrelevant.
However.
To choose some other combinations.
The vector C,
is not equal to the vector D.
Even though their directions are the same,
because the length of D
is not equal to the length of C.
And also, a vector
E That might be written like this is not
the same
as the vector F, even though their lengths
are the same.
The magnitude of E and the magnitude of F
might be equal, but the directions

are not the same.

Now, we define vector addition.
By taking the tail of one vector and
placing it on the head of another.
Drawing the resultant from the beginning
of the first one
to the end of the second.
If this is our vector A.
And this is our vector B.
What we do is, is we take B and put it
in exactly the same direction as it has,
preserving its direction.
Put it on the head of A, and then, we draw
the resultant from the beginning of A, and
I'm going to, just, put the,
indication that A vector is this big
guy on the right here so that we don't get
confused.
This becomes A plus B.
Okay, tail to head, tail to head, tail to
head.
This is our vector.
Now, we can call
that vector c, so instead of calling
it A plus B let's denote it by another
letter C and now you see that in a way we
have been able to define subtraction.
Look at what happens here.
C is equal to
A plus B.
That means
that B is equal to C
minus A.
So what happens
in subtraction is you take the two tails,
C, the tail of C, the tail of A, and you
connect the heads
and that defines your vector B, which is a
subtraction.
Of C minus A.
Okay.
So now where is all this going?
Why do we even bother with this stuff?
The reason we bother with it is because
experimentally, it has been determined
that force, believe
it or not, depends exactly like a vector.
It has all of its characteristics
associated with it with vector
addition and vector subtraction and other
operations that we can also define.
Let's look at a
simple example, a planet moving in a
circular orbit around a star
or, one star going around another star.
The situation is
as follows: here is our circular orbit,
here's the center where this big mass is
supposedly,
and here is a place where our planet is

located.
The position of the planet can be given by
a
vector, r, and we'll call it r1 because
it's a moment in time.
A little bit later, the planet has moved
its position.
To a place r2 at
time two.
And in fact, these are supposed to be the
same,
it's supposed to be the same size circle,
but, you know.
Now you can see that there has been a
change in
the position of the planet from time one
to time two.
And, we can see what that change is by
just drawing these two vectors,
r1 looks reasonable.
R2
looks reasonable.
And now, as we did before with
subtraction, this
becomes our change in r.
If
you go from r1 to r2 you have to add
this little amount.
Which is delta r.
And, the angle between these two positions
can be denoted by theta.
Now, what's happening as this planet is
moving around?
Not only is it changing its position, the
reason that it's changing its position is
because
it's moving.
And I think you can convince yourself that
the velocity of the planet must be denoted
by
a vector that is perpendicular to the
position.
Why does it have to be perpendicular, hm?
Well, I'm not going to answer that
question for you.
I want you to see on your own if you can
convince yourself that it has
to be perpendicular, and it can't be
something
going in this direction or in this
direction.
It must be at a right angle to the
position R1.
We can call that vector, the velocity
vector.
And just like we have a velocity at
time one, we also have a velocity at
time two.
Also perpendicular
to r2, okay?

And, if it's in
uniform circular motion, the lengths of
these
two vectors must be the same.
If they
weren't the same, then the motion, would
not be in
a circle.
Something would be happening, to the
position of this point, versus this point,
so that you would not be able to get
from r1 to r2 if the speed of the object
were actually changing.
But now let's look carefully at v1
and v2, if we draw v1,
over here, and we draw v2
over here.
We're going to have in exactly the same
fashion as we had a delta
r in this situation.
We're going to have a delta v
right over here.
And guess what that angle is, gang?
That angle is theta.
Why?
Convince yourself that this
angle has to be the same as this angle for
r.
So what we are faced with are two similar
triangles.
In which we can now look at various sides
and
see if we can come up with a relationship
for the acceleration.
I want to point out one very important
thing.
Look at the direction of delta v.
Delta v is pointing back in towards the
center of the circle.
And this will be a key point when we
look at how this relates to the
gravitational force.
So our
vector and as v1 gets closer and closer to
v2, namely a
smaller and smaller interval of time of,
is, observed to elapse.
Delta v gets closer and closer to being
pointed exactly towards the center of the
circle.
Okay, so let's look at these two
triangles, what we're after,
is an expression for the acceleration.
And the acceleration is
the change in velocity divided by the
change in time.
Now, velocity already contains a time,
right?
It's just the time rate of change of
position.

So now we can use these triangles and see

if
we can come up with a interesting
formula for what the so-called centripetal
acceleration is.
If we look at these triangles, we notice
that delta v is to v, we're looking at the
part
of the triangle here versus one of the
legs, and since the triangles
are similar, that has to be equal to delta
r over r, where now I'm dropping the
subscripts here because we're just looking
at the magnitude of the
acceleration.
And now we can work with
these particular quantities.
You can see that we're going to have to
have a delta t in here somewhere, so what
we're going to do
is, just divide both sides of the equation
by delta t.
If we put a delta t on this side of the
equation, then we can put
a delta t on the other side of the
equation and still
maintain equality.
But now, look at this.
[SOUND]
Delta v delta t is nothing more than our
acceleration.
And delta r, divided by delta t, is
nothing more than, the velocity, or the
speed.
At least the magnitude of the velocity.
So now, you can see that
delta r divided by delta t which is equal
to V
implies that delta V divided
by delta t equals V.
We're going to bring
this V over to this side of the equation.
To Delta R
divided by delta T is another factor of V.
So, we get V
squared and we're left with an R in the
denominator.
And so now we have established that in
circular motion,
the magnitude of the acceleration is equal
to v squared over r.
We have also established that by the
direction of v
being in towards the center of the circle.
It's
in the opposite direction of our vector r
so that we can
write the acceleration in general
as minus V squared over r.
In other words, the magnitude given by V

squared over r and the direction given by

the
minus sign of r in towards the centre of
the
circle.
And that's all we really need to know to
be able to determine a lot about the
dynamics
of planets going around stars, stars going
around yet more massive
stars, or for instance, the Sun going
around the center of the galaxy.
And in order to pursue that, we will
continue with a discussion of the
gravitational force.
I want to tell you why it took so long,
for us to
understand what the nature of forces were.
Why
did it take till the 17th century before
we could figure it
out?
And the key problem, was the quantity
associated with Delta t.
Notice, that Delta
t appears in both an expression for
velocity, and
also in the expression for acceleration.
How do we
measure delta t?
Well, we all know how we do it now.
We look at our watch and we say one, two,
three, four.
Or, we have a stopwatch that we can push a
button and get evermore accurate
divisions of any unit of time that we
want.
But in the 17th century, it wasn't until
around 1750 that Christiaan
Huygens, was able to invent an accurate
pendulum clock.
And all of a sudden we didn't need to use
the Earth's
rotation or sand dripping in an hourglass
in order to figure out
what the elapsed time was.
So, starting in the 1750s when clocks were
invented that gave us enough
precision into which we could measure and
divide a second.
That was when the era began that we were
able to actually figure out what the
difference was between a result that gave
us a velocity or
a result that might yield an acceleration.