I am trying to learn Quantum Field Theory the hard way: Alone and from textbooks. But there is something harder than the abstract math of advanced quantum physics:

You can aim at comprehending ancient texts on physics.

If you are an accomplished physicist, chemist or engineer – try to understand Sadi Carnot’s reasoning that was later called the effective discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

At Carnotcycle’s excellent blog on classical thermodynamics you can delve into thinking about well-known modern concepts in a new – or better: in an old – way. I found this article on the dawn of entropy a difficult ready, even though we can recognize some familiar symbols and concepts such as circular processes, and despite or because of the fact I was at the time of reading this article a heavy consumer of engineering thermodynamics textbooks. You have to translate now unused notions such as heat received and the expansive power into their modern counterparts. It is like reading a text in a foreign language by deciphering every single word instead of having developed a feeling for a language.

Stephen Hawking once published an anthology of the original works of the scientific giants of the past millennium: Corpernicus, Galieo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein: On the Shoulders of Giants. So just in case you googled for Hawkins – don’t expect your typical Hawking pop-sci bestseller with lost of artistic illustrations. This book is humbling. I found the so-called geometrical proofs most difficult and unfamiliar to follow. Actually, it is my difficulties in (not) taming that Pesky Triangle that motivated me to reflect on geometrical proofs.

I am used to proofs stacked upon proofs until you get to the real thing. In analysis lectures you get used to starting by proving that 1+1=2 (literally) until you learn about derivatives and slopes. However, Newton and his predecessor giants talk geometry all the way! I have learned a different language. Einstein’s way of tackling problems is most familiar though his physics is the most non-intuitive.

This amazon.com review is titled Now We Know why Geometry is Called the Queen of the Sciences and the reviewer perfectly nails it:

It is simply astounding how much mileage Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein got out of ordinary Euclidean geometry. In fact, it could be argued that Newton (along with Leibnitz) were forced to invent the calculus, otherwise they too presumably would have remained content to stick to Euclidean geometry.

Science writer Margaret Wertheim gives an account of a 20th century giant trying to recapture Isaac Newton’s original discovery of the law of gravitation in her book Physics on the Fringe (The main topic of the book are outsider physicists’ theories, I have blogged about the book here.).

This giant was Richard Feynman.

Today the gravitational force, gravitational potential and related acceleration objects in the gravitational fields are presented by means of calculus: The potential is equivalent to a rubber membrane model – the steeper the membrane, the higher the force. However, this is not a geometrical proof – this is an illustration of underlying calculus.

Today you start from the equation of motion for a object under the action of a force that weakens with the inverse square of the distance between two massive objects, and out pops Kepler’s law about elliptical orbits. It takes some pages of derivation, and you need to recognize conic sections in formulas – but nothing too difficult for an undergraduate student of science.

Newton actually had to invent calculus together with tinkering with the law of gravitation. In order to convince his peers he needed to use the geometrical language and the mental framework common back then. He uses all kinds of intricate theorems about triangles and intersecting lines (;-)) in order to say what we say today using the concise shortcuts of derivatives and differentials.

Wertheim states:

Feynman wasn’t doing this to advance the state of physics. He was doing it to experience the pleasure of building a law of the universe from scratch.

Feynman said to his students:

“For your entertainment and interest I want you to ride in a buggy for its elegance instead of a fancy automobile.”

But he underestimated the daunting nature of this task:

In the preparatory notes Feynman made for his lecture, he wrote: “Simple things have simple demonstrations.” Then, tellingly, he crossed out the second “simple” and replaced it with “elementary.” For it turns out there is nothing simple about Newton’s proof. Although it uses only rudimentary mathematical tools, it is a masterpiece of intricacy. So arcane is Newton’s proof that Feynman could not understand it.

Given the headache that even Corpernicus’ original proofs in the Shoulders of Giants gave me I can attest to:

… in the age of calculus, physicists no longer learn much Euclidean geometry, which, like stonemasonry, has become something of a dying art.

Richard Feynman has finally made up his own version of a geometrical proof to fully master Newton’s ideas, and Feynman’s version covered hundred typewritten pages, according to Wertheim.

Everybody who indulges gleefully in wooden technical prose and takes pride in plowing through mathematical ideas can relate to this:

For a man who would soon be granted the highest honor in science, it was a DIY triumph whose only value was the pride and joy that derive from being able to say, “I did it!”

Richard Feynman gave a lecture on the motion of the planets in 1964, that has later been called his Lost Lecture. In this lecture he presented his version of the geometrical proof which was simpler than Newton’s.

The proof presented in the lecture have been turned in a series of videos by Youtube user Gary Rubinstein. Feynman’s original lecture was 40 minutes long and confusing, according to Rubinstein – who turned it into 8 chunks of videos, 10 minutes each.

The rest of the post is concerned with what I believe that social media experts call curating. I am just trying to give an overview of the episodes of this video lecture. So my summaries do most likely not make a lot of sense if you don’t watch the videos. But even if you don’t watch the videos you might get an impression of what a geometrical proof actually is.

In Part I Kepler’s laws are briefly introduced. The characteristic properties of an ellipse are shown – in the way used by gardeners to creating an elliptical with a cord and a pencil. An ellipse can also be created within a circle by starting from a random point, connecting it to the circumference and creating the perpendicular bisector.

Part II starts with emphasizing that the bisector is actually a tangent to the ellipse (this will become an important ingredient in the proof later). Then Rubinstein switches to physics and shows how a planet effectively ‘falls into the sun’ according to Newton, that is a deviation due to gravity is superimposed to its otherwise straight-lined motion.

Part III shows in detail why the triangles swept out by the radius vector need to stay the same. The way Newton defined the size of the force in terms of parallelogram attached to the otherwise undisturbed path (no inverse square law yet mentioned!) gives rise to constant areas of the triangles – no matter what the size of the force is!

In Part IV the inverse square law in introduced – the changing force is associated with one side of the parallelogram denoting the deviation from motion without force. Feynman has now introduced the velocity as distance over time which is equal to size of the tangential line segments over the areas of the triangles. He created a separate ‘velocity polygon’ of segments denoting velocities. Both polygons – for distances and for velocities – look elliptical at first glance, though the velocity polygon seems more circular (We will learn later that it has to be a circle).

In Part V Rubinstein expounds that the geometrical equivalent of the change in velocity being proportional to 1 over radius squared times time elapsed with time elapsed being equivalent to the size of the triangles (I silently translate back to dv = dt times acceleration). Now Feynman said that he was confused by Newton’s proof of the resulting polygon being an ellipse – and he proposed a different proof:
Newton started from what Rubinstein calls the sun ‘pulsing’ at the same intervals, that is: replacing the smooth path by a polygon, resulting in triangles of equal size swept out by the radius vector but in a changing velocity.  Feynman divided the spatial trajectory into parts to which triangles of varying area e are attached. These triangles are made up of radius vectors all at the same angles to each other. On trying to relate these triangles to each other by scaling them he needs to consider that the area of a triangle scales with the square of its height. This also holds for non-similar triangles having one angle in common.

Part VI: Since ‘Feynman’s triangles’ have one angle in common, their respective areas scale with the squares of the heights of their equivalent isosceles triangles, thus basically the distance of the planet to the sun. The force is proportional to one over distance squared, and time is proportional to distance squared (as per the scaling law for these triangles). Thus the change in velocity – being the product of both – is constant! This is what Rubinstein calls Feynman’s big insight. But not only are the changes in velocity constant, but also the angles between adjacent line segments denoting those changes. Thus the changes in velocities make up for a regular polygon (which seems to turn into a circle in the limiting case).

Part VII: The point used to build up the velocity polygon by attaching the velocity line segments to it is not the center of the polygon. If you draw connections from the center to the endpoints the angle corresponds to the angle the planet has travelled in space. The animations of the continuous motion of the planet in space – travelling along its elliptical orbit is put side-by-side with the corresponding velocity diagram. Then Feynman relates the two diagrams, actually merges them, in order to track down the position of the planet using the clues given by the velocity diagram.

In Part VIII (embedded also below) Rubinstein finally shows why the planet traverses an elliptical orbit. The way the position of the planet has finally found in Part VII is equivalent to the insights into the properties of an ellipse found at the beginning of this tutorial. The planet needs be on the ‘ray’, the direction determined by the velocity diagram. But it also needs to be on the perpendicular bisector of the velocity segment – as force cause a change in velocity perpendicular to the previous velocity segment and the velocity needs to correspond to a tangent to the path.