June 17, 2018 Sunday
Bedtime Story
'Nature is Thrifty in All Its Actions'
Just like the World War II, Seven Years’
War was fought on a truly global scale spanning five continents, including the
Americas and Indian subcontinent.
The two parties at war were the Kingdom of
Great Britain accompanied by Prussia, Portugal, Hannover and other smaller
German states against the Kingdom of France along with Austrian-led Holy Roman
Empire, the Russian Empire, the House of Bourbon leading the Kingdom of Spain
and the Kingdom of Sweden.
From the alliance and the warring parties
it must be evident to you what an awkward position Maupertuis found himself in
Berlin; a Frenchman in Prussia, the two countries in a bitter global war
against each other.
The odd thing is that this made him an
unpopular man in both the countries as each saw him with unmistakable suspicion.
So eventually Maupertuis had to return to
Paris because as we know the Great War dragged on for seven years and his
position in Berlin, Prussia was becoming untenable.
Yet it was in Berlin, Prussia in 1744 (at
the age of 46) that he clearly stated the principle of least action as we know
it:
“Nature is thrifty in all its actions.”
Although I write that it was published in
1744, it took him two decades to ponder over this idea.
In his scientific writings he used a term
called ‘action’ in describing the essence of the concept of thriftiness in
nature.
In his writings, he established that the
‘action’ is a concept that could be expressed mathematically as a product of
mass of the body involved, the distance it has travelled and the velocity which
it did so.
In one of his papers, he proposed the Law
of bodies at rest (very evidently inspired by Newton’s laws) in which he argued
that a system of bodies at rest would tend to achieve such a position from
where any further change would lead to only the smallest change of
‘action’.
Later, in another paper that he published
to the Paris Academy while he himself was in Berlin in 1744, he wrote about the
behavior of light during refraction.
In it he wrote that that path that light
took when going from one medium to another, it chose the path that minimized
this entity called ‘action’.
Then yet again in his paper of 1746 titled
‘Laws of movement and rest’ when he was still in Berlin and which Maupertuis
published not in the Paris Academy but in the Berlin Academy of Sciences he
stressed that point masses also minimize ‘actions’.
Even though Maupertuis is given the credit
for discovering or enunciating the principle of least action and Maupertuis’
principle which is a special case of the more generalized principle of least
action applied to classical mechanics of movements of solid bodies, on hind
sight his formulation was not a scientific one.
In fact, Maupertuis was trying to propose a
view, though somewhat indirectly, that this economic behavior of the nature was
an argument for the existence of an infinitely wise creator.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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