The ancients first observed the way the planets seemed to move in the sky and concluded that they all, along with the earth, went around the sun. This discovery was later made independently by Copernicus, after people had forgotten that it had already been made.
what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth.
The only applications of the knowledge of the law that I can think of are in geophysical prospecting, in predicting the tides, and nowadays, more modernly, in working out the motions of the satellites and planet probes that we send up, and so on; and finally, also modernly, to calculate the predictions of the planets’ positions, which have great utility for astrologists who publish their predictions in horoscopes in the magazines. It is a strange world we live in – that all the new advances in understanding are used only to continue the nonsense which has existed for 2,000 years.
This is certainly no explanation of the machinery of gravitation! You might want to look further, and various people have tried to look further. Newton was originally asked about his theory – ‘But it doesn’t mean anything – it doesn’t tell us anything’. He said, ‘It tells you how it moves. That should be enough. I have told you how it moves, not why.’
Newton’s statement of the law of gravitation is relatively simple mathematics. It gets more and more abstruse and more and more difficult as we go on. Why? I have not the slightest idea. It is only my purpose here to tell you about this fact. The burden of the lecture is just to emphasize he fact that it is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case.
mathematics is not just another language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning; it is like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning. It is in fact a big collection of the results of some person’s careful thought and reasoning.
In Babylonian schools in mathematics the student would learn something by doing a large number of examples until he caught on to the general rule. Also he would know a large amount of geometry, a lot of the properties of circles, the theorem of Pythagoras, formulae for the areas of cubes and triangles; in addition, some degree of argument was available to go from one thing to another.
Now we have a problem. We can deduce often from one part of physics, like the Law of Gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation.
We have these wide principles which sweep across the different laws, and if we take the derivation too seriously, and feel that one is only valid because another is valid, then we cannot understand the interconnections of the different branches of physics.
Mathematically each of the three different formulations, Newton’s law, the local field method and the minimum principle, gives exactly the same consequences. What do we do then? You will read in all the books that we cannot decide scientifically on one or the other. That is true. They are equivalent scientifically. It is impossible to make a decision, because there is no experimental way to distinguish between them if all the consequences are the same. But psychologically they are very different in two ways. First, philosophically you like them or do not like them; and training is the only way to beat that disease. Second, psychologically they are different because they are completely unequivalent when you are trying to guess new laws.
If signals cannot go any faster than the speed of light, then it turns out that the method of describing the forces instantaneously is very poor. So in Einstein’s generalization of gravitation Newton’s method of describing physics is hopelessly inadequate and enormously complicated, whereas the field method is neat and simple, and so is the minimum principle.
One of the amazing characteristics of nature is the variety of interpretational schemes which is possible. It turns out that it is only possible because the laws are just so, special and delicate. For instance, that the law is the inverse square is what permits it to become local; if it were the inverse cube it could not be done that way. At the other end of the equation, the fact that the force is related to the rate of change of velocity is what permits the minimum principle way of writing the laws. If, for instance, the force were proportional to the rate of change of position instead of velocity, then you could not write it in that way. If you modify the laws much you find that you can only write them in fewer ways. I always find that mysterious, and I do not understand the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics seem to be expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time.
The physicist uses ordinary words in a peculiar manner.
It is easy to understand how an object can be symmetrical, but how can a physical law have a symmetry? Of course it cannot, but physicists delight themselves by using ordinary words for something else. In this case they have a feeling about the physical laws which is very close to the feeling of symmetry of objects, and they call it the symmetry of the laws.
There is a great difference between energy and availability of energy. The energy of the sea is a large amount, but it is not available to us.
we invent an ‘a’, which we call a probability amplitude, because we do not know what it means.
It is very hard to believe that the wiggling of the tentacle of the octopus is nothing but some fooling around of atoms
Newton’s ideas about space and time agreed with experiment very well, but in order to get the correct motion of the orbit of Mercury, which was a tiny, tiny difference, the difference in the character of the theory needed was enormous. The reason is that Newton’s laws were so simple and so perfect, and they produced definite results. In order to get something that would produce a slightly different result it had to be completely different. In stating a new law you cannot make imperfections on a perfect thing; you have to have another perfect thing. So the differences in philosophical ideas between Newton’s and Einstein’s theories of gravitation are enormous.
‘Yes’, says the astronomer, ‘and how accurately can you predict eclipses?’ He says, ‘I haven’t developed the thing very far yet’. Then says the astronomer, ‘Well, we can calculate eclipses more accurately than you can with your model, so you must not pay any attention to your idea because obviously the mathematical scheme is better’. There is a very strong tendency, when someone comes up with an idea and says, ‘Let’s suppose that the world is this way’, for people to say to him, ‘What would you get for the answer to such and such a problem?’ And he says, ‘I haven’t developed it far enough’. And they say, ‘Well, we have already developed it much further, and we can get the answers very accurately’. So it is a problem whether or not to worry about philosophies behind ideas.
It is possible to know when you are right way ahead of checking all the consequences. You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. It is always easy when you have made a guess, and done two or three little calculations to make sure that it is not obviously wrong, to know that it is right. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right – at least if you have any experience – because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. Your guess is, in fact, that something is very simple. If you cannot see immediately that it is wrong, and it is simpler than it was before, then it is right. The inexperienced, and crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.
What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket.
Another thing that will happen is that ultimately, if it turns out that all is known, or it gets very dull, the vigorous philosophy and the careful attention to all these things that I have been talking about will gradually disappear. The philosophers who are always on the outside making stupid remarks will be able to close in, because we cannot push them away