Brahe, Kepler, and then Galileo have made great strides in taking these celestial objects and studying

them as physical concepts that we can measure and discuss, and hopefully understand. But the real understanding, waited a few more decades for as I promised, Issac Newton. We're going to spend the next few clips following in the steps, the rather large steps of Sir Issac, and seeing what it was that he taught us, and we're going to start at the beginning with mechanics, the science of motion, which is going to underlie everything else. So we're going to do some physics. Bare with me. It's going to be intense. To study motion, the first thing we need to do is make mathematically precise what it is that Galileo said when he said, an object retains its state of motion. So mathematically the state of motion is represented by an object's velocity. Velocity is a physics concept. It means the speed with which something is moving along with its direction. So, we denote it by this v with an arrow on top of it. V stands velocity and the arrow reminds us that this is number, the speed at which something is moving, along with the direction, so that this ball could be moving at 1 meter per second. To your left or my left, and at 1 meter per second to my right, or up, or down, or in, or out, and those, even if the speeds are the same, are different values of the velocity. Velocity can be thought of, as we know, speed is measured in meters per second because it is the change in position, in where you are. The distance divided by time. And velocity can change. The ball can start slowly and speed up, and its change is called the acceleration. So acceleration is the rate at which velocity changes. And acceleration is measured therefore in meters per second. The difference in velocity between the beginning and the end

of an interval divided by the length of the interval. The same way that velocity is distance divided by time. Acceleration is velocity per time. And so the rate of change of velocity is an acceleration and it's measured in meters per second squared. And like velocity, acceleration has a direction. So that, if an object is moving to the left and speeding up, then its acceleration points to the left. If an object is moving to the left and slowing down, that means its velocity points to the left, but its acceleration points to the right, because the velocity is less to the left later in the interval than it was before. So acceleration like velocity has a direction. And in addition to expressing the fact that an object could be speeding up or slowing down, there could be a change of dir, of velocity that is associated with maintaining the same speed, but merely changing direction, an object is moving to the left and starts moving towards the camera. This is a change in velocity even if the speed never changed, and a particularly useful example for us in studying Astronomy is going to be in fact of motion without changing the speed. Lets look at it, and maybe it'll help clarify these concepts a little bit. The example we're going to want to study is the example of an object, say maybe a planet. Moving in a circle, about some center, say the sun, at a constant speed. So, in this first pane you see the black dot, which is our object, and it is set so that it is moving around the circle at a constant speed. Its speed is not changing. It's velocity however is clearly changing, because if I freeze the animation here the velocity of the object manifestly is pointed in this direction. It's moving that way. Whereas, if I let the animation go a little further, and freeze it again

here, the object is moving at the same speed, but in a different direction. So that there's definitely a change in velocity, and to quantify and understand this change in velocity, we'll move down to this pane, where I have put in the object velocity. It is an object with a direction so we draw it with an arrow. And the arrow at the beginning points up because that's the direction in which the object is moving, and as the object moves, the velocity changes because while the arrow is of the same length it's direction is continually changing. So, this is the way your velocity changes when you move around the circle at constant speed. Coming down here I've, got two circles. The circle along with the object is moving, and then this imaginary circle. And if you look what the imaginary circle does, is it, I've copied the blue arrow over to here, and drawn it so that its tail is always at origin. So the edge of this arrow. Is giving me the direction and, of course, the constant magnitude, constant size, of the velocity vector. when the arrow points to the right, the object is here, and it's moving to the right, and so on. So this is my velocity vector of e. Now I can understand how to measure acceleration. Acceleration is going to be the rate of change of this vector. So that if I freeze the animation at any given point, I can see what's going on. The object is over here. It is moving in this direction. That's why this velocity vector points this way. But I know where the velocity vector is going. It will next move over here to the right. So the, vector that measures the change in velocity, will point along this circle, just as the vector that measures the change in position points along this circle. To make that clear, here's the same two circles, and on this here, on the velocity circle, I've added a green arrow to represent the change in velocity.

And as they play you see that as the, the green arrow is constant in magnitude because the velocity is rotating at a constant rate just because this thing is rotating at a constant rate. And the green arrow points along the velocity circle and what this green arrow is in fact, is our acceleration. It's the rate of change of the velocity and so, to make that explicit, I've here done three circles. This is the position circle, this is the velocity circle, and over here we have the acceleration circle where I've taken the green arrow, the rate of change of velocity, and moved its tail to the center so that at any time, this gives me the rate at which the velocity is changing. So you can play with all three arrows, and I'll post this file, so you can try to run it. The main thing I want you to notice here is that if you look, there's a relation between the directions of the acceleration arrow and of the position arrow. When the position arrow points here to the upper left, the acceleration is to the bottom right, and that's not a coincidence. Velocity is 90 degrees to position. acceleration is 90 degrees to velocity, adding up to 180 degrees away from position. So when you're out here, your acceleration points that way, and if I move it and freeze it again, you'll see that this is always maintained. When you're at this position, your acceleration points in that position. So the acceleration at any given point is in fact, at any given time, is in fact pointing directly to the center of the circle. If you ask in which direction is this object moving, it's moving along the circle. In what direction is it accelerating? That way, towards the center. So we found that moving in a circular, in circular motion at a uniform speed, you're experiencing an acceleration of constant magnitude always directed towards the center of the

circle. Now, if it's important for us to understand this circular example better, so let's go through it. If the radius is R and the speed V, I want to know, we know the direction of your acceleration. What is its magnitude in meters per second squared? So I'm looking for an acceleration in meters per second squared. And it needs to be determined by, what is there to determine. The fact that you're moving around a circle of a given radius. At a given speed, and we all have an intuition, that if you're going faster around the curve, you'll need to accelerate more to take the curve. And if the curve is a tight curve, you need more of an acceleration. So lets see if this is born up, and we'll use a trick that physicists use. It comes from units. We're going to do what we call dimensional analysis. We need to find some combination of R and of v, that could, in principle, be an acceleration. And it turns out there's only one. Because if you think about it, R is measured in meters, it's a length. v, being a velocity or a speed, is measured in meters per second. We need to fashion out of these something that could potentially equal A, and it's clear that the only way we're going to get second squared in here, is to take the square of the velocity. So, write the square of the velocity. This is a good idea, but that is, has units of meters squared per second squared. Because it's the product of two things with units meters per second, so that's not quite right. this does not have the right dimensions but we need to clean out the meters and clean out the meters we can simply divide by r, which is measured in meters. Now, dimensional analysis doesn't always give the exactly right answer. If, if the acceleration could easily have turned out to be 3 pi times V squared over R.

And, the 3 pi would not show up in dimensional analysis. In the case at hand it turns out that there is no constant. You can do the calculation. Takes a little bit of effort, but, we're not going to do it. The answer is that we got the right answer for precise. Correct expression, using just this dimensional analysis, so the acceleration towards the center of the circle, is given by V squared over R. It has the fancy name, centripetal acceleration, because it is towards the center and this will show up often in what, in what comes next.