The discovery of the Higgs boson

Transcript for video 1.8

Gravitational forces and potential

Prof Luigi Del Debbio
So the final argument that we want to discuss within Newtonian mechanics is the gravitational potential. So we're going to consider the two bodies, one with mass, capital M, the other one with mass, little m. And then according to the Universal Law of Gravitation, there is a force that attracts the two bodies towards each other. The force is directed along the line connecting the two bodies. And the magnitude of the force is given by Newton's Constant - so this is just a number - times the product of the two masses, divided by the distance squared, OK? So r is just the distance between the two particles. Now, let's consider the following setting, OK? We want to describe the motion of this mass here, little m, which is due to the force generated by the mass, capital M. So in other words, we want to try to define a potential energy that describes how the mass, capital M, is attracting the mass, little m. So we want to find a function, V, which is the potential energy, such that minus the derivative of V with respect to the distance gives you the force acting on the particle, little m. Now, if we send the distance between the two bodies to infinity, so if we take the two particles to be infinitely away from each other, then clearly, according to the definition of the force here, you see that the force between the two will go to 0. So we are going to assume that when the distance is infinite, there is no potential acting on little m. So V of r goes to 0 when r goes to infinity. And then the potential at some finite value of r is going to be the work that has to be done by the gravitational attraction to bring the particle, little m, from infinity to some finite distance, r, OK? Now, you can compute this quantity. It's in one of the problems that you can find on the MOOC website. I'm not going to do the computation explicitly here. I'm just going to state the result. The potential here is going to be minus G, Newton's Constant, times M times m, divided by r, OK? And it's simple exercise to check that if you take this expression and plug it into this formula, you indeed recover the correct expression for the gravitational force, OK?

So this equation here defines the gravitational potential that if felt by the particle, little m, generated by this other particle here, capital M. So we have an explicit expression for the gravitational potential. We can actually sketch this function, and this is what it looks like, OK? So at every point in space which is specified by r here, we have an expression for the potential energy of the particle, little m, which is due to the gravitational interaction with the particle, capital M, up here, OK? So you see that when you're far away from the source of the gravitational force, the potential energy goes to 0, while it becomes very large and negative as you get closer and closer to the source of the gravitational force. Now, this is the first example that we see of a field, OK? A field is some mathematical function which depends on the space-time coordinates, in this case, simply on the distance, r, which describes some physical property of your system at any point in space. So in this particular example, the gravitational potential describes the potential energy which is due to the gravitational interaction at any point in space. Later on in this MOOC, you will see other examples of potentials and other examples of fields in slightly different contexts. However, the basic idea remains the same. I mean, a field is a mathematical function which describes some physical property at any point in space. Now, the gravitational potential is, hopefully, the most familiar potential, because it's the potential that is responsible for the motion of planets, for the formation of galaxies, and for most of the motion that we experience on Earth. So for instance, the gravitational attraction between a massive object and our planet is also described by this potential. And so, the fall of a massive object is encoded into this the function here. OK. So we reached the end of Week One. And before we move on to some new subjects, let us quickly summarise what we have seen this week, and what are the important concepts that you want to remember before you move on to some new topics. So first of all, we've discussed Newton's Law, and we've seen that Newton's Law allows you to describe a physical system in terms of mathematical equations that you can solve, and therefore, give you a predictive tool to actually discuss the dynamics of a classical system. So this is the first, sort of, important idea that you want to take home from Week One. The other important concepts that we have discussed are conservation laws. We've seen Conservation of Momentum. We've seen Conservation of Energy. And in discussing conservation of energy, we introduced the concept of potential energy, which is a very important concept. And we've seen two examples in detail. We've looked at the harmonic oscillator, and we've looked at the gravitational potential. Now, both examples are relevant for what is going to come in the following weeks, OK?

In particular, if you think of the gravitational potential, the gravitational potential is the potential that actually describes planetary motion. So if you think of how our solar system, the motion of planets around the sun is entirely described by the gravitational potential. Now, this idea was used as an analogy to try to build models of the atom. You will see next week that the electromagnetic interaction between charged particles is actually quite similar to the gravitational potential. So one called naively imagine that you could build atoms by analogy to the motion of planets in the solar system. You could think of the electrons as being described by classical orbits around the protons inside, say, the hydrogen atoms. Now one of the very big problems at the beginning of the 20th century is that this model, this classical model of the atom, failed spectacularly in trying to describe the experimental observations. And that is one of the reasons that's actually triggered a huge revolution in physics at the beginning of the 20th century, which led to quantum mechanics. And this is something which will be discussed next week. OK. So for now, that's all.

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