A Short History of Astronomy - Arthur Berry (read along books .txt) 📗

their distances from the sun; but the velocity of the planet may be found by dividing the length of the path it travels in its revolution round the sun by the time of the revolution, and this length is again proportional to the distance of the planet from the sun. Hence the velocities of the two planets are proportional to their distances from the sun, divided by the times of revolution, and consequently the squares of the velocities are proportional to the squares of the distances from the sun divided by the squares of the times of revolution. Hence, by Kepler’s law, the squares of the velocities are proportional to the squares of the distances divided by the cubes of the distances, that is the squares of the velocities are inversely proportional to the distances, the more distant planet having the less velocity and vice versa. Now by the formula of Huygens the acceleration is measured by the square of the velocity divided by the radius of the circle (which in this case is the distance of the planet from the sun). The accelerations of the two planets towards the sun are therefore inversely proportional to the distances each multiplied by itself, that is are inversely proportional to the squares of the distances. Newton’s first result therefore is: that the motions of the planets—regarded as moving in circles, and in strict accordance with Kepler’s Third Law—can be explained as due to the action of the sun, if the sun is supposed capable of producing on a planet an acceleration towards the sun itself which is proportional to the inverse square of its distance from the sun; i.e. at twice the distance it is 1∕4 as great, at three times the distance 1∕9 as great, at ten times the distance 1∕100 as great, and so on.

The argument may perhaps be made clearer by a numerical example. In round numbers Jupiter’s distance from the sun is five times as great as that of the earth, and Jupiter takes 12 years to perform a revolution round the sun, whereas the earth takes one. Hence Jupiter goes in 12 years five times as far as the earth goes in one, and Jupiter’s velocity is therefore about 5∕12 that of the earth’s, or the two velocities are in the ratio of 5 to 12; the squares of the velocities are therefore as 5 × 5 to 12 × 12, or as 25 to 144. The accelerations of Jupiter and of the earth towards the sun are therefore as 25 ÷ 5 to 144, or as 5 to 144; hence Jupiter’s acceleration towards the sun is about 1∕28 earth, and if we had taken more accurate figures this fraction would have come out more nearly 1∕25. Hence at five times the distance the acceleration is 25 times less.

This law of the inverse square, as it may be called, is also the law according to which the light emitted from the sun or any other bright body varies, and would on this account also be not unlikely to suggest itself in connection with any kind of influence emitted from the sun.

173. The next step in Newton’s investigation was to see whether the motion of the moon round the earth could be explained in some similar way. By the same argument as before, the moon could be shewn to have an acceleration towards the earth. Now a stone if let drop falls downwards, that is in the direction of the centre of the earth, and, as Galilei had shewn (chapter VI., § 133), this motion is one of uniform acceleration; if, in accordance with the opinion generally held at that time, the motion is regarded as being due to the earth, we may say that the earth has the power of giving an acceleration towards its own centre to bodies near its surface. Newton noticed that this power extended at any rate to the tops of mountains, and it occurred to him that it might possibly extend as far as the moon and so give rise to the required acceleration. Although, however, the acceleration of falling bodies, as far as was known at the time, was the same for terrestrial bodies wherever situated, it was probable that at such a distance as that of the moon the acceleration caused by the earth would be much less. Newton assumed as a working hypothesis that the acceleration diminished according to the same law which he had previously arrived at in the case of the sun’s action on the planets, that is that the acceleration produced by the earth on any body is inversely proportional to the square of the distance of the body from the centre of the earth.

It may be noticed that a difficulty arises here which did not present itself in the corresponding case of the planets. The distances of the planets from the sun being large compared with the size of the sun, it makes little difference whether the planetary distances are measured from the centre of the sun or from any other point in it. The same is true of the moon and earth; but when we are comparing the action of the earth on the moon with that on a stone situated on or near the ground, it is clearly of the utmost importance to decide whether the distance of the stone is to be measured from the nearest point of the earth, a few feet off, from the centre of the earth, 4000 miles off, or from some other point. Provisionally at any rate Newton decided on measuring from the centre of the earth.

It remained to verify his conjecture in the case of the moon by a numerical calculation; this could easily be done if certain things were known, viz. the acceleration of a falling body on the earth, the distance of the surface of the earth from its centre, the distance of the moon, and the time taken by the moon to perform a revolution round the earth. The first of these was possibly known with fair accuracy; the last was well known; and it was also known that the moon’s distance was about 60 times the radius of the earth. How accurately Newton at this time knew the size of the earth is uncertain. Taking moderately accurate figures, the calculation is easily performed. In a month of about 27 days the moon moves about 60 times as far as the distance round the earth; that is she moves about 60 × 24,000 miles in 27 days, which is equivalent to about 3,300 feet per second. The acceleration of the moon is therefore measured by the square of this, divided by the distance of the moon (which is 60 times the radius of the earth, or 20,000,000 feet); that is, it is (3,300 × 3,300)∕(60 × 20,000,000), which reduces to about 1∕110. Consequently, if the law of the inverse square holds, the acceleration of a falling body at the surface of the earth, which is 60 times nearer to the centre than the moon is, should be (60 × 60)∕110, or between 32 and 33; but the actual acceleration of falling bodies is rather more than 32. The argument is therefore satisfactory, and Newton’s hypothesis is so far verified.

The analogy thus indicated between the motion of the moon round the earth and the motion of a falling stone may be illustrated by a comparison, due to Newton, of the moon to a bullet shot horizontally out of a gun from a high place on the earth. Let the bullet start from B in fig. 71, then moving at first horizontally it will describe a curved path and reach the ground at a point such as C, at some distance from the point A, vertically underneath its starting-point. If it were shot out with a greater velocity, its path at first would be flatter and it would reach the ground at a point C′ beyond C; if the velocity were greater still, it would reach the ground at C″ or at C‴; and it requires only a slight effort of the imagination to conceive that, with a still greater velocity to begin with, it would miss the earth altogether and describe a circuit round it, such as B D E. This is exactly what the moon does, the only difference being that the moon is at a much greater distance than we have supposed the bullet to be, and that her motion has not been produced by anything analogous to the gun; but the motion being once there it is immaterial how it was produced or whether it was ever produced in the past. We may in fact say of the moon “that she is a falling body, only she is going so fast and is so far off that she falls quite round to the other side of the earth, instead of hitting it; and so goes on for ever.”102