The Inverse Cube Force Law
john (baez@math.ucr.edu)
The Inverse Cube Force Law
Posted by John Baez
Here’s a draft of my next column for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. It’s about the inverse cube force law in classical mechanics.
Newton’s Principia is famous for his investigations of the inverse square force law for gravity. But in this book Newton also did something that was rarely discussed until the 1990s. He figured out what kind of central force exerted upon a particle can rescale its angular velocity by a constant factor..