Why Stuff Can Orbit, Part 10: Where Time Comes From And How It Changes Things

Art courtesy of Thomas K Dye, creator of the web comic Newshounds. He has a Patron for those able to support his work.

Previously:

• Laying Some Groundwork
• Why Stuff Can’t Orbit
• It Turns Out Spinning Matters
• On The L
• Why Physics Doesn’t Work And What To Do About It
• Circles and Where To Find Them
• ALL the Circles
• Introducing Stability
• How The Spring In The Cosmos Behaves

And the supplemental reading:

• How Differential Calculus Works
• How Mathematical Physics Works
• Everything Interesting There Is To Say About Springs
• What Second Derivatives Are And What They Can Do For You

---

And again my thanks to Thomas K Dye, creator of the web comic Newshounds, for the banner art. He has a Patreon to support his creative habit.

In the last installment I introduced perturbations. These are orbits that are a little off from the circles that make equilibriums. And they introduce something that’s been lurking, unnoticed, in all the work done before. That’s time.

See, how do we know time exists? … Well, we feel it, so, it’s hard for us not to notice time exists. Let me rephrase it then, and put it in contemporary technology terms. Suppose you’re looking at an animated GIF. How do you know it’s started animating? Or that it hasn’t stalled out on some frame?

If the picture changes, then you know. It has to be going. But if it doesn’t change? … Maybe it’s stalled out. Maybe it hasn’t. You don’t know. You know there’s time when you can see change. And that’s one of the little practical insights of physics. You can build an understanding of special relativity by thinking hard about that. Also think about the observation that the speed of light (in vacuum) doesn’t change.

When something physical’s in equilibrium, it isn’t changing. That’s how we found equilibriums to start with. And that means we stop keeping track of time. It’s one more thing to keep track of that doesn’t tell us anything new. Who needs it?

For the planet orbiting a sun, in a perfect circle, or its other little variations, we do still need time. At least some. How far the planet is from the sun doesn’t change, no, but where it is on the orbit will change. We can track where it is by setting some reference point. Where the planet is at the start of our problem. How big is the angle between where the planet is now, the sun (the center of our problem’s universe), and that origin point? That will change over time.

But it’ll change in a boring way. The angle will keep increasing in magnitude at a constant speed. Suppose it takes five time units for the angle to grow from zero degrees to ten degrees. Then it’ll take ten time units for the angle to grow from zero to twenty degrees. It’ll take twenty time units for the angle to grow from zero to forty degrees. Nice to know if you want to know when the planet is going to be at a particular spot, and how long it’ll take to get back to the same spot. At this rate it’ll be eighteen time units before the angle grows to 360 degrees, which looks the same as zero degrees. But it’s not anything interesting happening.

We’ll label this sort of change, where time passes, yeah, but it’s too dull to notice as a “dynamic equilibrium”. There’s change, but it’s so steady and predictable it’s not all that exciting. And I’d set up the circular orbits so that we didn’t even have to notice it. If the radius of the planet’s orbit doesn’t change, then the rate at which its apsidal angle changes, its “angular velocity”, also doesn’t change.

Now, with perturbations, the distance between the planet and the center of the universe will change in time. That was the stuff at the end of the last installment. But also the apsidal angle is going to change. I’ve used ‘r(t)’ to represent the radial distance between the planet and the sun before, and to note that what value it is depends on the time. I need some more symbols.

There’s two popular symbols to use for angles. Both are Greek letters because, I dunno, they’ve always been. (Florian Cajori’s A History of Mathematical Notation doesn’t seem to have anything. And when my default go-to for explaining mathematician’s choices tells me nothing, what can I do? Look at Wikipedia? Sure, but that doesn’t enlighten me either.) One is to use theta, θ. The other is to use phi, φ. Both are good, popular choices, and in three-dimensional problems we’ll often need both. We don’t need both. The orbit of something moving under a central force might be complicated, but it’s going to be in a single plane of movement. The conservation of angular momentum gives us that. It’s not the last thing angular momentum will give us. The orbit might happen not to be in a horizontal plane. But that’s all right. We can tilt our heads until it is.

So I’ll reach deep into the universe of symbols for angles and call on θ for the apsidal angle. θ will change with time, so, ‘θ(t)’ is the angular counterpart to ‘r(t)’.

I’d said before the apsidal angle is the angle made between the planet, the center of the universe, and some reference point. What is my reference point? I dunno. It’s wherever θ(0) is, that is, where the planet is when my time ‘t’ is zero. There’s probably a bootstrapping fallacy here. I’ll cover it up by saying, you know, the reference point doesn’t matter. It’s like the choice of prime meridian. We have to have one, but we can pick whatever one is convenient. So why not pick one that gives us the nice little identity that ‘θ(0) = 0’? If you don’t buy that and insist I pick a reference point first, fine, go ahead. But you know what? The labels on my time axis are arbitrary. There’s no difference in the way physics works whether ‘t’ is ‘0’ or ‘2017’ or ‘21350’. (At least as long as I adjust any time-dependent forces, which there aren’t here.) So we get back to ‘θ(0) = 0’.

For a circular orbit, the dynamic equilibrium case, these are pretty boring, but at least they’re easy to write. They’re:

Here ‘a’ is the radius of the circular orbit. And ω is a constant number, the angular velocity. It’s how much a bit of time changes the apsidal angle. And this set of equations is pretty dull. You can see why it barely rates a mention.

The perturbed case gets more interesting. We know how ‘r(t)’ looks. We worked that out last time. It’s some function like:

Here ‘A’ and ‘B’ are some numbers telling us how big the perturbation is, and ‘m’ is the mass of the planet, and ‘k’ is something related to how strong the central force is. And ‘a’ is that radius of the circular orbit, the thing we’re perturbed around.

What about ‘θ(t)’? How’s that look? … We don’t seem to have a lot to go on. We could go back to Newton and all that force equalling the change in momentum over time stuff. We can always do that. It’s tedious, though. We have something better. It’s another gift from the conservation of angular momentum. When we can turn a forces-over-time problem into a conservation-of-something problem we’re usually doing the right thing. The conservation-of-something is typically a lot easier to set up and to track. We’ve used it in the conservation of energy, before, and we’ll use it again. The conservation of ordinary, ‘linear’, momentum helps other problems, though not I’ll grant this one. The conservation of angular momentum will help us here.

So what is angular momentum? … It’s something about ice skaters twirling around and your high school physics teacher sitting on a bar stool spinning a bike wheel. All right. But it’s also a quantity. We can get some idea of it by looking at the formula for calculating linear momentum:

The linear momentum of a thing is its inertia times its velocity. This is if the thing isn’t moving fast enough we have to notice relativity. Also if it isn’t, like, an electric or a magnetic field so we have to notice it’s not precisely a thing. Also if it isn’t a massless particle like a photon because see previous sentence. I’m talking about ordinary things like planets and blocks of wood on springs and stuff. The inertia, ‘m’, is rather happily the same thing as its mass. The velocity is how fast something is travelling and which direction it’s going in.

Angular momentum, meanwhile, we calculate with this radically different-looking formula:

Here, again, talking about stuff that isn’t moving so fast we have to notice relativity. That isn’t electric or magnetic fields. That isn’t massless particles. And so on. Here ‘I’ is the “moment of inertia” and is the angular velocity. The angular velocity is a vector that describes for us how fast the spinning is and what direction the axis around which the thing spins is. The moment of inertia describes how easy or hard it is to make the thing spin around each axis. It’s a tensor because real stuff can be easier to spin in some directions than in others. If you’re not sure that’s actually so, try tossing some stuff in the air so it spins in each of the three major directions. You’ll see.

We’re fortunate. For central force problems the moment of inertia is easy to calculate. We don’t need the tensor stuff. And we don’t even need to notice that the angular velocity is a vector. We know what axis the planet’s rotating around; it’s the one pointing out of the plane of motion. We can focus on the size of the angular velocity, the number ‘ω’. See how they’re different, what with one not having an arrow over the symbol. The arrow-less version is easier. For a planet, or other object, with mass ‘m’ that’s orbiting a distance ‘r’ from the sun, the moment of inertia is:

So we know this number is going to be constant:

The mass ‘m’ doesn’t change. We’re not doing those kinds of problem. So however ‘r’ changes in time, the angular velocity ‘ω’ has to change with it, so that this product stays constant. The angular velocity is how the apsidal angle ‘θ’ changes over time. So since we know ‘L’ doesn’t change, and ‘m’ doesn’t change, then the way ‘r’ changes must tell us something about how ‘θ’ changes. We’ll get into that next time.