Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun
Feynman's Lost Lecture is a book about one held by Richard Feynman physics lecture on the movement of the planets around the sun.
The lecture, at issue here, Richard Feynman held on March 13, 1964 at the California Institute of Technology in his own words to the delight of students. You no longer belonged to the test substance and had no input in the three -volume work " Feynman Lectures on Physics" found. In 1992, the archivist Judith R. Goodstein a tape recording and some prepared by Feynman diagrams to make sure, and then together with her husband, the physicist David. L. Goodstein, this reconstructed as -lost lecture. From the book published by WW Norton & Company 1996 book Feynman 's Lost Lecture was created, it was translated into German by Anita and Jürgen Ehlers.
After a brief historical review of Copernicus to Newton and some biographical notes on Richard Feynman Feynman presented by Goodstein reconstructed and elaborated in every detail proof of the elliptical sentence, after the lecture is given in the text itself. In the American edition, the existing audio document is also on CD.
It is stated as Newton was on the basis of the third Kepler 's law, the right distance law for his law of gravitation and had then derived inversely based on this law of gravitation and his mechanics, Kepler 's laws. Here is the ellipse block after which the planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun, the hardest part. Feynman mentioned that even Newton had presented a purely geometric proof in the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, but it had used arguments about conic sections, which were not familiar to him ( Feynman ). He had therefore brought the evidence on its own way to the end. It is this evidence is the focus of the book. It is characterized in that it is elementary in the sense that only mathematics at secondary I used. Nevertheless, the evidence is called not easy.
Starting from the definition of an ellipse as a set of all points specified by two points, the so-called hot spots, a constant distance sum have ( Gardener construction ), it is deduced that a focal point of light beam emanating from the elliptical line is reflected to the other focal point. This results in the following design procedure of an ellipse from a given circle: In addition to the center of the circle, another point from the circle inside is excellent as the focal point. At any point on the circumference then one constructs the image point as the intersection of the line and the perpendicular bisector to the track. The set of all such constructed image points is an ellipse. This is then later the crucial geometric fact in Feynman's argument, which includes a chart speed of planetary motion on the elliptical shape of the orbit. Feynman cites the source of his idea of the proof a work of U. Fano on the Rutherford scattering formula, the latter is also carried out in the final part of the lecture.