My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Hamiltonian

Today’s A To Z term is another I drew from Mr Wu, of the Singapore Math Tuition blog. It gives me more chances to discuss differential equations and mathematical physics, too.

The Hamiltonian we name for Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the 19th century Irish mathematical physicists who worked on everything. You might have encountered his name from hearing about quaternions. Or for coining the terms “scalar” and “tensor”. Or for work in graph theory. There’s more. He did work in Fourier analysis, which is what you get into when you feel at ease with Fourier series. And then wild stuff combining matrices and rings. He’s not quite one of those people where there’s a Hamilton’s Theorem for every field of mathematics you might be interested in. It’s close, though.

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Hamiltonian.

When you first learn about physics you learn about forces and accelerations and stuff. When you major in physics you learn to avoid dealing with forces and accelerations and stuff. It’s not explicit. But you get trained to look, so far as possible, away from vectors. Look to scalars. Look to single numbers that somehow encode your problem.

A great example of this is the Lagrangian. It’s built on “generalized coordinates”, which are not necessarily, like, position and velocity and all. They include the things that describe your system. This can be positions. It’s often angles. The Lagrangian shines in problems where it matters that something rotates. Or if you need to work with polar coordinates or spherical coordinates or anything non-rectangular. The Lagrangian is, in your general coordinates, equal to the kinetic energy minus the potential energy. It’ll be a function. It’ll depend on your coordinates and on the derivative-with-respect-to-time of your coordinates. You can take partial derivatives of the Lagrangian. This tells how the coordinates, and the change-in-time of your coordinates should change over time.

The Hamiltonian is a similar way of working out mechanics problems. The Hamiltonian function isn’t anything so primitive as the kinetic energy minus the potential energy. No, the Hamiltonian is the kinetic energy plus the potential energy. Totally different in idea.

From that description you maybe guessed you can transfer from the Lagrangian to the Hamiltonian. Maybe vice-versa. Yes, you can, although we use the term “transform”. Specifically a “Legendre transform”. We can use any coordinates we like, just as with Lagrangian mechanics. And, as with the Lagrangian, we can find how coordinates change over time. The change of any coordinate depends on the partial derivative of the Hamiltonian with respect to a particular other coordinate. This other coordinate is its “conjugate”. (It may either be this derivative, or minus one times this derivative. By the time you’re doing work in the field you’ll know which.)

That conjugate coordinate is the important thing. It’s why we muck around with Hamiltonians when Lagrangians are so similar. In ordinary, common coordinate systems these conjugate coordinates form nice pairs. In Cartesian coordinates, the conjugate to a particle’s position is its momentum, and vice-versa. In polar coordinates, the conjugate to the angular velocity is the angular momentum. These are nice-sounding pairs. But that’s our good luck. These happen to match stuff we already think is important. In general coordinates one or more of a pair can be some fusion of variables we don’t have a word for and would never care about. Sometimes it gets weird. In the problem of vortices swirling around each other on an infinitely great plane? The horizontal position is conjugate to the vertical position. Velocity doesn’t enter into it. For vortices on the sphere the longitude is conjugate to the cosine of the latitude.

What’s valuable about these pairings is that they make a “symplectic manifold”. A manifold is a patch of space where stuff works like normal Euclidean geometry does. In this case, the space is in “phase space”. This is the collection of all the possible combinations of all the variables that could ever turn up. Every particular moment of a mechanical system matches some point in phase space. Its evolution over time traces out a path in that space. Call it a trajectory or an orbit as you like.

We get good things from looking at the geometry that this symplectic manifold implies. For example, if we know that one variable doesn’t appear in the Hamiltonian, then its conjugate’s value never changes. This is almost the kindest thing you can do for a mathematical physicist. But more. A famous theorem by Emmy Noether tells us that symmetries in the Hamiltonian match with conservation laws in the physics. Time-invariance, for example — time not appearing in the Hamiltonian — gives us the conservation of energy. If only distances between things, not absolute positions, matter, then we get conservation of linear momentum. Stuff like that. To find conservation laws in physics problems is the kindest thing you can do for a mathematical physicist.

The Hamiltonian was born out of planetary physics. These are problems easy to understand and, apart from the case of one star with one planet orbiting each other, impossible to solve exactly. That’s all right. The formalism applies to all kinds of problems. They’re very good at handling particles that interact with each other and maybe some potential energy. This is a lot of stuff.

More, the approach extends naturally to quantum mechanics. It takes some damage along the way. We can’t talk about “the” position or “the” momentum of anything quantum-mechanical. But what we get when we look at quantum mechanics looks very much like what Hamiltonians do. We can calculate things which are quantum quite well by using these tools. This though they came from questions like why Saturn’s rings haven’t fallen part and whether the Earth will stay around its present orbit.

It holds surprising power, too. Notice that the Hamiltonian is the kinetic energy of a system plus its potential energy. For a lot of physics problems that’s all the energy there is. That is, the value of the Hamiltonian for some set of coordinates is the total energy of the system at that time. And, if there’s no energy lost to friction or heat or whatever? Then that’s the total energy of the system for all time.

Here’s where this becomes almost practical. We often want to do a numerical simulation of a physics problem. Generically, we do this by looking up what all the values of all the coordinates are at some starting time t₀. Then we calculate how fast these coordinates are changing with time. We pick a small change in time, Δ t. Then we say that at time t₀ plus Δ t, the coordinates are whatever they started at plus Δ t times that rate of change. And then we repeat, figuring out how fast the coordinates are changing now, at this position and time.

The trouble is we always make some mistake, and once we’ve made a mistake, we’re going to keep on making mistakes. We can do some clever stuff to make the smallest error possible figuring out where to go, but it’ll still happen. Usually, we stick to calculations where the error won’t mess up our results.

But when we look at stuff like whether the Earth will stay around its present orbit? We can’t make each step good enough for that. Unless we get to thinking about the Hamiltonian, and our symplectic variables. The actual system traces out a path in phase space. Everyone on that path the Hamiltonian is a particular value, the energy of the system. So use the regular methods to project most of the variables to the new time, t₀ + Δ t. But the rest? Pick the values that make the Hamiltonian work out right. Also momentum and angular momentum and other stuff we know get conserved. We’ll still make an error. But it’s a different kind of error. It’ll project to a point that’s maybe in the wrong place on the trajectory. But it’s on the trajectory.

(OK, it’s near the trajectory. Suppose the real energy is, oh, the square root of 5. The computer simulation will have an energy of 2.23607. This is close but not exactly the same. That’s all right. Each step will stay close to the real energy.)

So what we’ll get is a projection of the Earth’s orbit that maybe puts it in the wrong place in its orbit. Putting the planet on the opposite side of the sun from Venus when we ought to see Venus transiting the Sun. That’s all right, if what we’re interested in is whether Venus and Earth are still in the solar system.

There’s a special cost for this. If there weren’t we’d use it all the time. The cost is computational complexity. It’s pricey enough that you haven’t heard about these “symplectic integrators” before. That’s all right. These are the kinds of things open to us once we look long into the Hamiltonian.

This wraps up my big essay-writing for the week. I will pluck some older essays out of obscurity to re-share tomorrow and Saturday. All of Fall 2019 A To Z posts should be at this link. Next week should have the letter I on Tuesday and J on Thursday. All of my A To Z essays should be available at this link. And I am still interested in topics I might use for the letters K through N. Thank you.

Everything Interesting There Is To Say About Springs

I need another supplemental essay to get to the next part in Why Stuff Can Orbit. (Here’s the last part.) You probably guessed it’s about springs. They’re useful to know about. Why? That one killer Mystery Science Theater 3000 short, yes. But also because they turn up everywhere.

Not because there are literally springs in everything. Not with the rise in anti-spring political forces. But what makes a spring is a force that pushes something back where it came from. It pushes with a force that grows just as fast as the distance from where it came grows. Most anything that’s stable, that has some normal state which it tends to look like, acts like this. A small nudging away from the normal state gets met with some resistance. A bigger nudge meets bigger resistance. And most stuff that we see is stable. If it weren’t stable it would have broken before we got there.

(There are exceptions. Stable is, sometimes, about perspective. It can be that something is unstable but it takes so long to break that we don’t have to worry about it. Uranium, for example, is dying, turning slowly into stable elements like lead and helium. There will come a day there’s none left in the Earth. But it takes so long to break down that, barring surprises, the Earth will have broken down into something else first. And it may be that something is unstable, but it’s created by something that’s always going on. Oxygen in the atmosphere is always busy combining with other chemicals. But oxygen stays in the atmosphere because life keeps breaking it out of other chemicals.)

Now I need to put in some terms. Start with your thing. It’s on a spring, literally or metaphorically. Don’t care. If it isn’t being pushed in any direction then it’s at rest. Or it’s at an equilibrium. I don’t want to call this the ideal or natural state. That suggests some moral superiority to one way of existing over another, and how do I know what’s right for your thing? I can tell you what it acts like. It’s your business whether it should. Anyway, your thing has an equilibrium.

Next term is the displacement. It’s how far your thing is from the equilibrium. If it’s really a block of wood on a spring, like it is in high school physics, this displacement is how far the spring is stretched out. In equations I’ll represent this as ‘x’ because I’m not going to go looking deep for letters for something like this. What value ‘x’ has will change with time. This is what makes it a physics problem. If we want to make clear that ‘x’ does depend on time we might write ‘x(t)’. We might go all the way and start at the top of the page with ‘x = x(t)’, just in case.

If ‘x’ is a positive number it means your thing is displaced in one direction. If ‘x’ is a negative number it was displaced in the opposite direction. By ‘one direction’ I mean ‘to the right, or else up’. By ‘the opposite direction’ I mean ‘to the left, or else down’. Yes, you can pick any direction you like but why are you making life harder for everyone? Unless there’s something compelling about the setup of your thing that makes another choice make sense just go along with what everyone else is doing. Apply your creativity and iconoclasm where it’ll make your life better instead.

Also, we only have to worry about one direction. This might surprise you. If you’ve played much with springs you might have noticed how they’re three-dimensional objects. You can set stuff swinging back and forth in two directions at once. That’s all right. We can describe a two-dimensional displacement as a displacement in one direction plus a displacement perpendicular to that. And if there’s no such thing as friction, they won’t interact. We can pretend they’re two problems that happen to be running on the same spring at the same time. So here I declare: we can ignore friction and pretend it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to deal with more than one direction at a time.

(It’s not only friction. There’s problems about how energy gets transmitted between ways the thing can oscillate. This is what causes what starts out as a big whack in one direction to turn into a middling little circular wobbling. That’s a higher level physics than I want to do right now. So here I declare: we can ignore that and pretend it doesn’t matter.)

Whether your thing is displaced or not it’s got some potential energy. This can be as large or as small as you like, down to some minimum when your thing is at equilibrium. The potential energy we represent as a number named ‘U’ because of good reasons that somebody surely had. The potential energy of a spring depends on the square of the displacement. We can write its value as ‘U = ½ k x²‘. Here ‘k’ is a number known as the spring constant. It describes how strongly the spring reacts; the bigger ‘k’ is, the more any displacement’s met with a contrary force. It’ll be a positive number. ½ is that same old one-half that you know from ideas being half-baked or going-off being half-cocked.

Potential energy is great. If you can describe a physics problem with its energy you’re in good shape. It lets us bring physical intuition into understanding things. Imagine a bowl or a Habitrail-type ramp that’s got the cross-section of your potential energy. Drop a little marble into it. How the marble rolls? That’s what your thingy does in that potential energy.

Also we have mathematics. Calculus, particularly differential equations, lets us work out how the position of your thing will change. We need one more piece for this. That’s the momentum of your thing. Momentum is traditionally represented with the letter ‘p’. And now here’s how stuff moves when you know the potential energy ‘U’:

$\frac{dp}{dt} = - \frac{\partial U}{\partial x}$

Let me unpack that. $\frac{dp}{dt}$ — also known as $\frac{d}{dt}p$ if that looks better — is “the derivative of p with respect to t”. It means “how the value of the momentum changes as the time changes”. And that is equal to minus one times …

You might guess that $\frac{\partial U}{\partial x}$ — also written as $\frac{\partial}{\partial x} U$ — is some kind of derivative. The $\partial$ looks kind of like a cursive d, after all. It’s known as the partial derivative, because it means we look at how ‘U’ changes as ‘x’ and nothing else at all changes. With the normal, ‘d’ style full derivative, we have to track how all the variables change as the ‘t’ we’re interested in changes. In this particular problem the difference doesn’t matter. But there are problems where it does matter and that’s why I’m careful about the symbols.

So now we fall back on how to take derivatives. This gives us the equation that describes how the physics of your thing on a spring works:

$\frac{dp}{dt} = - k x$

You’re maybe underwhelmed. This is because we haven’t got any idea how the momentum ‘p’ relates to the displacement ‘x’. Well, we do, because I know and if you’re still reading at this point you know full well what momentum is. But let me make it official. Momentum is, for this kind of thing, the mass ‘m’ of your thing times how its position is changing, which is $\frac{dx}{dt}$ . The mass of your thing isn’t changing. If you’re going to let it change then we’re doing some screwy rocket problem and that’s a different article. So its easy to get the momentum out of that problem. We get instead the second derivative of the displacement with respect to time:

$m\frac{d^2 x}{dt^2} = - kx$

Fine, then. Does that tell us anything about what ‘x(t)’ is? Not yet, but I will now share with you one of the top secrets that only real mathematicians know. We will take a guess to what the answer probably is. Then we’ll see in what circumstances that answer could possibly be right. Does this seem ad hoc? Fine, so it’s ad hoc. Here is the secret of mathematicians:

It’s fine if you get your answer by any stupid method you like, including guessing and getting lucky, as long as you check that your answer is right.

Oh, sure, we’d rather you get an answer systematically, since a system might give us ideas how to find answers in new problems. But if all we want is an answer then, by definition, we don’t care where it came from. Anyway, we’re making a particular guess, one that’s very good for this sort of problem. Indeed, this guess is our system. A lot of guesses at solving differential equations use exactly this guess. Are you ready for my guess about what solves this? Because here it is.

We should expect that

$x(t) = C e^{r t}$

Here ‘C’ is some constant number, not yet known. And ‘r’ is some constant number, not yet known. ‘t’ is time. ‘e’ is that number 2.71828(etc) that always turns up in these problems. Why? Because its derivative is very easy to take, and if we have to take derivatives we want them to be easy to take. The first derivative of $Ce^{rt}$ with respect to ‘t’ is $r Ce^{rt}$ . The second derivative with respect to ‘t’ is $r^2 Ce^{rt}$ . so here’s what we have:

$m r^2 Ce^{rt} = - k Ce^{rt}$

What we’d like to find are the values for ‘C’ and ‘r’ that make this equation true. It’s got to be true for every value of ‘t’, yes. But this is actually an easy equation to solve. Why? Because the $C e^{rt}$ on the left side has to equal the $C e^{rt}$ on the right side. As long as they’re not equal to zero and hey, what do you know? $C e^{rt}$ can’t be zero unless ‘C’ is zero. So as long as ‘C’ is any number at all in the world except zero we can divide this ugly lump of symbols out of both sides. (If ‘C’ is zero, then this equation is 0 = 0 which is true enough, I guess.) What’s left?

$m r^2 = -k$

OK, so, we have no idea what ‘C’ is and we’re not going to have any. That’s all right. We’ll get it later. What we can get is ‘r’. You’ve probably got there already. There’s two possible answers:

$r = \pm\sqrt{-\frac{k}{m}}$

You might not like that. You remember that ‘k’ has to be positive, and if mass ‘m’ isn’t positive something’s screwed up. So what are we doing with the square root of a negative number? Yes, we’re getting imaginary numbers. Two imaginary numbers, in fact:

$r = \imath \sqrt{\frac{k}{m}}, r = - \imath \sqrt{\frac{k}{m}}$

Which is right? Both. In some combination, too. It’ll be a bit with that first ‘r’ plus a bit with that second ‘r’. In the differential equations trade this is called superposition. We’ll have information that tells us how much uses the first ‘r’ and how much uses the second.

You might still be upset. Hey, we’ve got these imaginary numbers here describing how a spring moves and while you might not be one of those high-price physicists you see all over the media you know springs aren’t imaginary. I’ve got a couple responses to that. Some are semantic. We only call these numbers “imaginary” because when we first noticed they were useful things we didn’t know what to make of them. The label is an arbitrary thing that doesn’t make any demands of the numbers. If we had called them, oh, “Cardanic numbers” instead would you be upset that you didn’t see any Cardanos in your springs?

My high-class semantic response is to ask in exactly what way is the “square root of minus one” any less imaginary than “three”? Can you give me a handful of three? No? Didn’t think so.

And then the practical response is: don’t worry. Exponentials raised to imaginary numbers do something amazing. They turn into sine waves. Well, sine and cosine waves. I’ll spare you just why. You can find it by looking at the first twelve or so posts of any pop mathematics blog and its article about how amazing Euler’s Formula is. Given that Euler published, like, 2,038 books and papers through his life and the fifty years after his death it took to clear the backlog you might think, “Euler had a lot of Formulas, right? Identities too?” Yes, he did, but you’ll know this one when you see it.

What’s important is that the displacement of your thing on a spring will be described by a function which looks like this:

$x(t) = C_1 e^{\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t} + C_2 e^{-\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t}$

for two constants, ‘C₁‘ and ‘C₂‘. These were the things we called ‘C’ back when we thought the answer might be $Ce^{rt}$ ; there’s two of them because there’s two r’s. I give you my word this is equivalent to a formula like this, but you can make me show my work if you must:

$x(t) = A cos\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right) + B sin\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right)$

for some (other) constants ‘A’ and ‘B’. Cosine and sine are the old things you remember from learning about cosine and sine.

OK, but what are ‘A’ and ‘B’?

Generically? We don’t care. Some numbers. Maybe zero. Maybe not. The pattern, how the displacement changes over time, will be the same whatever they are. It’ll be regular oscillation. At one time your thing will be as far from the equilibrium as it gets, and not moving toward or away from the center. At one time it’ll be back at the center and moving as fast as it can. At another time it’ll be as far away from the equilibrium as it gets, but on the other side. At another time it’ll be back at the equilibrium and moving as fast as it ever does, but the other way. How far is that maximum? What’s the fastest it travels?

The answer’s in how we started. If we start at the equilibrium without any kind of movement we’re never going to leave the equilibrium. We have to get nudged out of it. But what kind of nudge? There’s three ways you can do to nudge something out.

You can tug it out some and let it go from rest. This is the easiest: then ‘A’ is however big your tug was and ‘B’ is zero.

You can let it start from equilibrium but give it a good whack so it’s moving at some initial velocity. This is the next-easiest: ‘A’ is zero, and ‘B’ is … no, not the initial velocity. You need to look at what the velocity of your thing is at the start. That’s the first derivative:

$\frac{dx}{dt} = -\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}}A sin\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right) + \sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} B sin\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right)$

The start is when time is zero because we don’t need to be difficult. when ‘t’ is zero the above velocity is $\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} B$ . So that product has to be the initial velocity. That’s not much harder.

The third case is when you start with some displacement and some velocity. A combination of the two. Then, ugh. You have to figure out ‘A’ and ‘B’ that make both the position and the velocity work out. That’s the simultaneous solutions of equations, and not even hard equations. It’s more work is all. I’m interested in other stuff anyway.

Because, yeah, the spring is going to wobble back and forth. What I’d like to know is how long it takes to get back where it started. How long does a cycle take? Look back at that position function, for example. That’s all we need.

$x(t) = A cos\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right) + B sin\left(\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} t\right)$

Sine and cosine functions are periodic. They have a period of 2π. This means if you take the thing inside the parentheses after a sine or a cosine and increase it — or decrease it — by 2π, you’ll get the same value out. What’s the first time that the displacement and the velocity will be the same as their starting values? If they started at t = 0, then, they’re going to be back there at a time ‘T’ which makes true the equation

$\sqrt{\frac{k}{m}} T = 2\pi$

And that’s going to be

$T = 2\pi\sqrt{\frac{m}{k}}$

Maybe surprising thing about this: the period doesn’t depend at all on how big the displacement is. That’s true for perfect springs, which don’t exist in the real world. You knew that. Imagine taking a Junior Slinky from the dollar store and sticking a block of something on one end. Imagine stretching it out to 500,000 times the distance between the Earth and Jupiter and letting go. Would it act like a spring or would it break? Yeah, we know. It’s sad. Think of the animated-cartoon joy a spring like that would produce.

But this period not depending on the displacement is true for small enough displacements, in the real world. Or for good enough springs. Or things that work enough like springs. By “true” I mean “close enough to true”. We can give that a precise mathematical definition, which turns out to be what you would mean by “close enough” in everyday English. The difference is it’ll have Greek letters included.

So to sum up: suppose we have something that acts like a spring. Then we know qualitatively how it behaves. It oscillates back and forth in a sine wave around the equilibrium. Suppose we know what the spring constant ‘k’ is. Suppose we also know ‘m’, which represents the inertia of the thing. If it’s a real thing on a real spring it’s mass. Then we know quantitatively how it moves. It has a period, based on this spring constant and this mass. And we can say how big the oscillations are based on how big the starting displacement and velocity are. That’s everything I care about in a spring. At least until I get into something wild like several springs wired together, which I am not doing now and might never do.

And, as we’ll see when we get back to orbits, a lot of things work close enough to springs.

Why Stuff Can Orbit, Part 5: Why Physics Doesn’t Work And What To Do About It

Less way previously:

My title’s hyperbole, to the extent it isn’t clickbait. Of course physics works. By “work” I mean “model the physical world in useful ways”. If it didn’t work then we would call it “pure” mathematics instead. Mathematicians would study it for its beauty. Physicists would be left to fend for themselves. “Useful” I’ll say means “gives us something interesting to know”. “Interesting” I’ll say if you want to ask what that means then I think you’re stalling.

But what I mean is that Newtonian physics, the physics learned in high school, doesn’t work. Well, it works, in that if you set up a problem right and calculate right you get answers that are right. It’s just not efficient, for a lot of interesting problems. Don’t ask me about interesting again. I’ll just say the central-force problems from this series are interesting.

Newtonian, high school type, physics works fine. It shines when you have only a few things to keep track of. In this central force problem we have one object, a planet-or-something, that moves. And only one force, one that attracts the planet to or repels the planet from the center, the Origin. This is where we’d put the sun, in a planet-and-sun system. So that seems all right as far as things go.

It’s less good, though, if there’s constraints. If it’s not possible for the particle to move in any old direction, say. That doesn’t turn up here; we can imagine a planet heading in any direction relative to the sun. But it’s also less good if there’s a symmetry in what we’re studying. And in this case there is. The strength of the central force only changes based on how far the planet is from the origin. The direction only changes based on what direction the planet is relative to the origin. It’s a bit daft to bother with x’s and y’s and maybe even z’s when all we care about is the distance from the origin. That’s a number we’ve called ‘r’.

So this brings us to Lagrangian mechanics. This was developed in the 18th century by Joseph-Louis Lagrange. He’s another of those 18th century mathematicians-and-physicists with his name all over everything. Lagrangian mechanics are really, really good when there’s a couple variables that describe both what we’d like to observe about the system and its energy. That’s exactly what we have with central forces. Give me a central force, one that’s pointing directly toward or away from the origin, and that grows or shrinks as the radius changes. I can give you a potential energy function, V(r), that matches that force. Give me an angular momentum L for the planet to have, and I can give you an effective potential energy function, V_eff(r). And that effective potential energy lets us describe how the coordinates change in time.

The method looks roundabout. It depends on two things. One is the coordinate you’re interested in, in this case, r. The other is how fast that coordinate changes in time. This we have a couple of ways of denoting. When working stuff out on paper that’s often done by putting a little dot above the letter. If you’re typing, dots-above-the-symbol are hard. So we mark it as a prime instead: r’. This works well until the web browser or the word processor assumes we want smart quotes and we already had the r’ in quote marks. At that point all hope of meaning is lost and we return to communicating by beating rocks with sticks. We live in an imperfect world.

What we get out of this is a setup that tells us how fast r’, how fast the coordinate we’re interested in changes in time, itself changes in time. If the coordinate we’re interested in is the ordinary old position of something, then this describes the rate of change of the velocity. In ordinary English we call that the acceleration. What makes this worthwhile is that the coordinate doesn’t have to be the position. It also doesn’t have to be all the information we need to describe the position. For the central force problem r here is just how far the planet is from the center. That tells us something about its position, but not everything. We don’t care about anything except how far the planet is from the center, not yet. So it’s fine we have a setup that doesn’t tell us about the stuff we don’t care about.

How fast r’ changes in time will be proportional to how fast the effective potential energy, V_eff(r), changes with its coordinate. I so want to write “changes with position”, since these coordinates are usually the position. But they can be proxies for the position, or things only loosely related to the position. For an example that isn’t a central force, think about a spinning top. It spins, it wobbles, it might even dance across the table because don’t they all do that? The coordinates that most sensibly describe how it moves are about its rotation, though. What axes is it rotating around? How do those change in time? Those don’t have anything particular to do with where the top is. That’s all right. The mathematics works just fine.

A circular orbit is one where the radius doesn’t change in time. (I’ll look at non-circular orbits later on.) That is, the radius is not increasing and is not decreasing. If it isn’t getting bigger and it isn’t getting smaller, then it’s got to be staying the same. Not all higher mathematics is tricky. The radius of the orbit is the thing I’ve been calling r all this time. So this means that r’, how fast r is changing with time, has to be zero. Now a slightly tricky part.

How fast is r’, the rate at which r changes, changing? Well, r’ never changes. It’s always the same value. Anytime something is always the same value the rate of its change is zero. This sounds tricky. The tricky part is that it isn’t tricky. It’s coincidental that r’ is zero and the rate of change of r’ is zero, though. If r’ were any fixed, never-changing number, then the rate of change of r’ would be zero. It happens that we’re interested in times when r’ is zero.

So we’ll find circular orbits where the change in the effective potential energy, as r changes, is zero. There’s an easy-to-understand intuitive idea of where to find these points. Look at a plot of Veff and imagine this is a smooth track or the cross-section of a bowl or the landscaping of a hill. Imagine dropping a ball or a marble or a bearing or something small enough to roll in it. Where does it roll to a stop? That’s where the change is zero.

It’s too much bother to make a bowl or landscape a hill or whatnot for every problem we’re interested in. We might do it anyway. Mathematicians used to, to study problems that were too complicated to do by useful estimates. These were “analog computers”. They were big in the days before digital computers made it no big deal to simulate even complicated systems. We still need “analog computers” or models sometimes. That’s usually for problems that involve chaotic stuff like turbulent fluids. We call this stuff “wind tunnels” and the like. It’s all a matter of solving equations by building stuff.

We’re not working with problems that complicated. There isn’t the sort of chaos lurking in this problem that drives us to real-world stuff. We can find these equilibriums by working just with symbols instead.

A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Lagrangian

It’s another of my handful of free choice days today. I’ll step outside the abstract algebra focus I’ve somehow gotten lately to look instead at mechanics.

Lagrangian.

So, you likely know Newton’s Laws of Motion. At least you know of them. We build physics out of them. So a lot of applied mathematics relies on them. There’s a law about bodies at rest staying at rest. There’s one about bodies in motion continuing in a straight line. There’s one about the force on a body changing its momentum. Something about F equalling m a. There’s something about equal and opposite forces. That’s all good enough, and that’s all correct. We don’t use them anyway.

I’m overstating for the sake of a good hook. They’re all correct. And if the problem’s simple enough there’s not much reason to go past this F and m a stuff. It’s just that once you start looking at complicated problems this gets to be an awkward tool. Sometimes a system is just hard to describe using forces and accelerations. Sometimes it’s impossible to say even where to start.

For example, imagine you have one of those pricey showpiece globes. The kind that’s a big ball that spins on an axis, and whose axis in on a ring that can tip forward or back. And it’s an expensive showpiece globe. That axis is itself in another ring that rotates clockwise and counterclockwise. Give the globe a good solid spin so it won’t slow down anytime soon. Then nudge the frame, so both the horizontal ring and the ring the axis is on wobble some. The whole shape is going to wobble and move in some way. We ought to be able to model that. How? Force and mass and acceleration barely seem to even exist.

The Lagrangian we get from Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who in the 18th century saw a brilliant new way to understand physics. It doesn’t describe how things move in response to forces, at least not directly. It describes how things move using energy. In particular, it uses on potential energy and kinetic energy.

This is brilliant on many counts. The biggest is in switching from forces to energy. Forces are vectors; they carry information about their size and their direction. Energy is a scalar; it’s just a number. A number is almost always easier to work with than a number alongside a direction.

The second big brilliance is that the Lagrangian gives us freedom in choosing coordinate systems. We have to know where things are and how they’re changing. The first obvious guess for how to describe things is their position in space. And that works fine until we look at stuff such as this spinning, wobbling globe. That never quite moves, although the spinning and the wobbling is some kind of motion. The problem begs us to think of the globe’s rotation around three different axes. Newton doesn’t help us with that. The Lagrangian, though —

The Lagrangian lets us describe physics using “generalized coordinates”. By this we mean coordinates that make sense for the problem even if they don’t directly relate to where something or other is in space. Any pick of coordinates is good, as long as we can describe the potential energy and the kinetic energy of the system using them.

I’ve been writing about this as if the Lagrangian were the cure for all hard work ever. It’s not, alas. For example, we often want to study big bunches of particles that all attract (or repel) each other. That attraction (or repulsion) we represent as potential energy. This is easier to deal with than forces, granted. But that’s easier, which is not the same as easy.

Still, the Lagrangian is great. We can do all the physics we used to. And we have a new freedom to set up problems in convenient ways. And the perspective of looking at energy instead of forces gives us a fruitful view on physics problems.

Hamiltonian.

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Lagrangian.

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