Feynman's Lost Lecture by David Goodstein

Author:David Goodstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1996-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

At this point in his lecture, Feynman says, “The demonstration that you have just seen is an exact copy of one in the Principia Mathematica by Newton,” but he goes on to say that he could not follow Newton’s arguments any further, and that he “cooked up” the rest of the demonstration of the law of ellipses himself. Before turning to Feynman’s demonstration, however, let us interject another argument that Feynman has disposed of earlier in his lecture: where does the inverse-square-of-the-distance force of gravity come in?

The inverse-square-of-the-distance (from now on we’ll just call it the R-2) nature of gravity is deduced from Kepler’s third law, which says that the time it takes a planet to make one complete orbit (that is, one year in the life of the planet) is proportional to the 3/2 power of the planet’s distance from the Sun. Actually, since the orbits of the planets are ellipses with the Sun at one focus, a given planet is not always the same distance from the Sun:

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