Newton's theory of gravity (part 2)

I have not posted (I can't quite bring myself to use "blogged" as a verb in the past tense, but I should probably get over such squeamishness) in almost a month now, for which I apologize. My excuses are standard - my work intruded. In the last month I have started looking at data from a new run and been to a conference (I've also been to my 10th high school reunion), and I am now visiting the mine in Canada I mentioned in one of the original posts to help run an experiment underground. Enough about my current activities, however, as it's time that I finally finished off the series on galactic rotation curves and Newtonian gravity. Unfortunately, I've realized that I still can't finish this in one post, but we'll get there eventually.

Mother, I'm sorry to say that we're going to need equations, but hopefully it won't be so bad. We'll start with Newton's Second Law of Motion, which says that F=ma. That's it. Force equals mass times acceleration. This law governs almost all macroscopic kinematics (a fancy word for the physics of motion). When you apply a force to something (say by pushing a book across a table), the book will accelerate with a particular acceleration depending on its mass. As with a lot of physics, this is intuitive, especially if we rewrite the equation as a=F/m. If I push a very light object, I can accelerate it rapidly (m is small, so the acceleration is big). If I try to push a heavy object like a car, I can barely move it at all (m is very large, so the acceleration is small). Likewise, the harder I push (more force), the faster it will accelerate.

Ok, next we'll look at circular motion where I'm presented with a pedagogical dilemma. Ultimately, I only really want the equation of circular motion (F=mv²/r), but I can't very well just state the equation without trying to explain it. I condescendingly fear, however, that any attempts at explaining it with a single paragraph in this blog will only result in confusion (which raises a question concerning the wisdom of the entire endeavor, but I'll ignore that). But here goes. In a circle, there are two important directions: the radial direction, which points from the center of the circle to a point on the circle itself, and the tangential direction, which is perpendicular to the radial direction. At any point on the circle, these directions have the same relationship to each other.

The key to circular motion (i.e. when an object just travels in a perfect circle forever and ever) is that the instantaneous velocity is always tangential to the circle while the acceleration is always radially inward. Imagine that my mother is on a ferris wheel. At point "A" on the ferris wheel, she is travelling straight to the left. At point "B" on the wheel, she is travelling straight down (for example, if she were to jump off the ferris wheel at that point, she would drop straight down). Likewise at points "C" and "D," she is travelling to the right and straight up, respectively. The point being that she is always moving tangentially and never radially.

The strange thing is that the force she experiences (the "centripetal force") is always radially inward. At this point, I think I may just have to revert to a "trust me." It's a matter of mathematical fact that to keep her motion circular, she must experience only radial forces. And if you work out the math, the necessary force is F=mv²/r; in other words, the force required to keep her in circular motion is proportional to the square of her velocity divided by the radius. This does make sense intuitively. The faster she is moving, the more force is required to get her to go around the circle. And, the larger the circle, the less change is required to keep her in orbit.

I'm very unsatisfied with that explanation, but I'll leave it for now. The final equation we need is Newton's equation of gravity. This is an empirical law (keeping in mind the discussion in the prior post). Newton discovered that two masses (call them m1 and m2) separated by a distance (call it r) will exert an attractive force on each other, F=G*m₁*m₂/r², where G is a constant that is experimentally determined and set by nature. Every mass in the universe exerts such a force on every other mass and vice versa. However, the value of G is very small, so it takes either an extraordinarily large mass (like the Earth or the Sun) or an extremely small separation to observe this force. But that's all there is to Newtonian gravity.