In case you’re wondering…

…who writes these texts just take a look at the upper right corner.
I decided to follow the steps in this simple tutorial: Google+ publisher code with badge and +1 button and now I have a direct connection between my blogs and my google+ profile.
This will serve as a reminder for me to really blog this year and try to learn a lot of cool things.

Take care and watch this space.

Newtonian Physics – Introduction

The first thing I want to say about this post is that its title is actually a misnomer. Much of what I’ll say here is valid for pretty much the rest of the blog, while some things are only pertinent to Newtonian Physics.

The approach taken in this blog for developing the physical theories will be the axiomatic one. I’ll do this because of brevity, internal elegance and consistency. Of course, I’m well aware of the fact that this is only possible with hindsight but I think that one has a lot to gain when physics is presented this way. Maybe the one who has more to gain is the presenter than the presentee, but since this is my blog I’m calling all the shots.

Maybe a word is in order for what the word axiom means and a little bit of history will be needed (gasp!!! the first self-contradiction!!!). In ancient Greece, the place where normally one thinks real science started to take shape (actually it wasn’t but this is a whole other can of worms), people who concerned themselves with such matters used two words to signify two things that nowadays are taken as synonyms. Those two words were: axiom and postulate.

Back in the day axiom was taken to be a self-evident truth while a postulate was taken to be something that one would have to take for certain for the sake of constructing an argument. So, axiom was a deep truth of nature while a postulate was something that humans had to resort to in order to reach new knowledge.

As an example of an axiom we have Euclid’s fifth (which revealed itself to be quite the deep mathematical truth!) and as an example of a postulate one has the assumption that Hipparchus made that the sun rays travelled in straight lines from the Sun to the Earth and Moon while he calculated the distances and sizes of those three bodies.

People have become a lot more cynical and in modern day usage those two terms are used as synonyms (and the meaning that prevails is the postulate one).

Axioms arise in Mathematics when one is willing to construct a theory that will unify a body of (not so) disjoint facts into a coherent whole. One should take proper care that the propositions one uses as the building blocks are enough for completeness and internal coherence and can derive the maximum amount of new facts with the minimum amount of assumed propositions.

In Physics things seem to be different at first sight but let me show you that things aren’t that different after all. For starters one knows ever since Galileo that the verbal method of Aristotle – (metha)physics – isn’t the way to go for one to know, predict and even interfere in natural phenomena. For all of this to happen mathematical tools are needed. One gets deeper into the truth of things, and one is also able to get technological progress that, besides of messing up with the natural environment, also makes people’s life easier. It isn’t enough to tell that bodies fall under gravity, one has also to specify where, with what energy, under what time interval such a fall happens.

For instance Newton’s theory as it was done by Newton was axiomatic. His three laws are just another name for axioms. They are the propositions that contain the undefined terms whose validity one has to accept in order to achieve new results.

One fundamental difference now arises. While in Mathematics things are normally evaluated in terms of self-consistency and internal elegance (this is a HUGE oversimplification) in physics things are also judged by how good the new results compare to actual measurements in the real world. In Physics physical theories have to be consistent with what see around us (another HUGE oversimplification). Hence if Newton’s Principia predicted squared orbits for the planets, Newton’s Principia would have to be scrapped.

Another difference is at the way we physicists arrive at the axioms: normally one has some experimental facts and start thinking about them and how they are linked with each other. Hopefully one will then be able to put the most fundamental properties as building blocks of our theories and call them axioms (in Physics it is more usual to call them laws).

After digressing a little, thanks for reading by the way, let me proceed with the defense of the axiomatic way in Physics. One other thing is that I think that knowledge is a lot more sound when one knows where one stands and why one is standing there and not some other place. So, if  I tell you what are our basics (it doesn’t matter how we get to them) and derive all that can be derived from them I believe that sounder knowledge is achieved.

The historical/phenomenological method has as its big advantage (according to me at least) of showing the inner struggles each concept has to endure before being accepted and being part of the reigning paradigm. It also makes things more approachable at a first attempt, but I think that the merits of this approach stop at this initial pedagogy.

The downsides of the axiomatic way are that, at first sight, it seems highly artificial, and may not be what most people are used to and want to see when wanting to learn physics.

Moving on from this rather big lecture let me explain what I’ll do in the Newtonian Physics part of this blog:

1. I’ll start off by introducing units of measurement, dimensional analysis and explain why they are important in Physics.
2. A little bit on error propagation and why it matters in physics. Yes, this is mostly a theoretical blog but I consider this to be part of the physicist knowing where he/she stands paradigm.
3. Assume that the reader knows differential and integral calculus (even though I’ll continue my posts on Basic Mathematics).
4. Introduce the Newtonian axioms and what most people think Newton meant to say what while introducing them.
5. Do a lot of calculations.
6. Have a lot of fun!

Get your Physics here

It’s been a while since my last update on this blog, but I can assure you that things will go on.

I still intend to follow the plan I laid out in the beginning and I understand if some people are getting turned of by the long bouts of inactivity this blog has (the next post is almost finished though).

For the ones of you that just can’t wait to get your Physics right away you can go to this other blog of mine: ateixeira. I’m starting with the Physics right away (and I think that in the future some of what I’ll write there will end up in here), even though it’ll be on a somewhat advanced level.

So, if you just can’t wait to get to Physics just click here and get done with it!

Um novo blog

Um grupo de amigos decidiu preencher um vácuo da blogosfera em português: Mar de Dirac.

O objectivo do blog é produzir nova Física através da interacção dos seus membros e ser também uma plataforma de ensino e discussão da Física (e áreas directamente relacionadas) em português sem ter medo de se recorrer a equações.

Visitem, comentem e divulguem.

Real Analysis – Limits and Continuity V

The condition is somewhat hard to get into our heads as neophytes. On top of that the similarity of the definition for limit and continuity can increase the confusion and to try to counter those frequent turn of events the first part of this post will try to clarify the condition by means of examples.

— for Continuity —

First we’ll start things off with something really simple.

Let which is obviously continuous.

The gist of the the reasoning is that we want to show that no matter the that is chosen at first it is always possible to find an that satisfies Heine’s criterion for continuity.

Getting back to our function it is . Here so

Which is trivially true since by assumption. Hence any value of will satisfy Heine’s criterion for continuity and is continuous at .

Since we never made any assumption about other than we conclude that is continuous in all points of its domain.

Let us now look at . Again we’ll look at continuity for point ():

The last expression is just we want at this stage since want to have something of the form (the first part of the criterion).

If we let it is and this completes our proof that is continuous at point .

And again since we never made any assumption about other than we conclude that is continuous in all points of its domain.

Now we let and will see if is continuous at .

Hence if we let it is and is continuous at .

As a final example of Heine’s criterion of continuity we’ll look into .

Since we want something like the last expression isn’t very useful to us.

In this case we’ll take an alternative approach which nevertheless works and has exactly the same spirit of what we’ve using so far.

Please look at every step I make with a critical eye and see if you can really understand what’s going on with this deduction.

Since we know that at some point will be in the first quadrant. Thus

Where the last inequality follows by hypothesis.

That is to say that if we let it is which is the epsilon delta definition of continuity.

— for Limits —

After looking into some simple proofs for continuity we’ll take a look at for limits.

The procedure is the same, but we’ll state it explicitly so that people can see it in action.

Let . We want to show that it is .

Which is trivially true for any value of , hence can be any positive real number.

Let . We want to show that it is .

With we satisfy the for limit.

As a final example let us look at the modified Dirichlet function that was introduced at this post.

At that post it was proved that for didn’t exist and it was promised that in a later date I’d show that using the epsilon delta condition.

Since we now know what the epsilon delta condition is and already have some experience with it will tackle this somewhat more abstruse problem.

Since or we have two cases to look at.

In the first case it is which is trivially valid, hence can be any real positive number.

In the second case it is . Hence letting gets the job done.

Since we proved that the conclusion is that the modified Dirichlet function that was presented is only continuous at .

As was said previously, they don’t make local concepts more local than that.

Real Analysis Exercises III

1.

a) Calculate and

As we can see the first term cancels out with the fourth, the third with the sixth, and so on and all we are left with is the second and second last terms:

b) Calculate using the previous result.

Defining the previous sum can be written as

This last result apparently has a funny story. Mengoli was the first one to calculate .

At the time this happened people did research in mathematics (I’m using this term rather abusively) in a somewhat different vein. They didn’t rush to print what they found like today.

Many times people held out their results for years while tormenting their rivals about what they found.

This is exactly what Mengoli did. In the times he was around the theory of series wasn’t much developed, thus this result, that we can calculate without being particularly brilliant in Mathematics, was something to take note of.

So, he wrote some letters to people saying that , but not how he concluded that.

The other mathematicians he sent the result too didn’t know about his methods and all they could do was to add numbers up explicitly and the only thing they could see was that even though they could sum more and more terms the result was always less than and was got nearer and nearer to .

Of course this didn’t prove nothing since summing up a billion terms isn’t the same as summing an infinite number of terms and everyone but Mengoli was dumbfounded with that surprising result.

c) Calculate

In this exercise what we are calculating is the sum of consecutive odd numbers. This result was already known to the ancient Greeks and the result wasn’t nothing short to astounding to them.

But enough with the talk already:

With

Using the now familiar formula

An astounding result indeed!

Just look to , interpret the result and try not to be as surprised as the ancient Greeks were.

2.

a) Using 1.a) and calculate

b) Using a) establish the Bernoulli inequality if and

If it is which is trivially true.

If it is which is trivially true.

For and it is:

Thus

Since

Finally if it is

Thus

Since

c) Use b) to calculate if and then conclude that if .

By b) it is

Hence

For the second part of the exercise we will calculate instead since that we know that

Let us make a change of variable . Thus and

3. Consider the sequences and

a) Calculate and . Then use Bernoulli’s inequality to show that is strictly decreasing and that is strictly increasing.

After having calculated we can use Bernoulli’s inequality, with , to conclude that is strictly decreasing.

Thus is strictly decreasing.

With a similar technique we can prove that

After that by using Bernoulli’s inequality like in the previous example one can show that and thus is strictly increasing.

c) Using a) and b) and prove the following inequalities .

We already know that is decreasing so it is

On the other hand is increasing and so .

Hence

d) Use c) to prove that

And now for the second part of the inequality:

In conclusion it is

4.

a) Using 3d) show that

From

With a similar reasoning we can also prove that .

Thus it is

b) Sum the previous inequalities between .

Now

And

It also is

And

Thus it is

c) Conclude the following inequalities and establish Stirling's approximation with

On the other hand

Thus

And from this follows

Defining it is with

5.

Show that and that

We know that

Thus and this equivalent to saying that

Let . In this case it is . Since is a subsequence of we know that and so it also is .

6. Show that and

By hypothesis it is , with .

Substituting the second equality in the first we obtain .

Let and we write with .

Thus

7. Let and . Show that .

and with and bounded sequences. Now

Let it is since is bounded.

Thus

8. Using Stirling’s approximation show that

We know that it is with . Thus

Where we used the fact that is decreasing function.

Thus is bounded and so as desired.

Real Analysis – Limits and Continuity IV

As an application of theorem 35 let us look into the functions and .

Now and is a strictly increasing function, and also is a strictly increasing function.

By theorem 35 it is and .

As for it is and .

Definition 33 Let ; , and . Let us suppose that there exists such as . If we say that is asymptotically equal to when and write . If we say that is little-o of when and write . If is bounded in some neighborhood of we say that is big-o of when and write .

If in the previous definition doesn’t equal zero:

1. .
2. .
3. is bounded in some neighborhood of .

These notions work exactly as they worked for sequences and they give the same type of information about the behavior of the functions in question.

Theorem 36 Let ; , and . Then: If and , then If and , then and . Proof: Left as an exercise.

As an example of the previous definitions we can say, with full generality, that for any polynomial function we can keep track of the term with the leading degree if we are interested in how it behaves for larger and larger values.

But on the other hand if we are interested on how the polynomial function behaves near the origin we have to keep track of the term with the smaller degree. To see that this is indeed so let us introduce the following example:

Now . If we take it is and so it is .

Another example that has a lot of interest to us is:

We can see that it is so because of

— 6.6. Epsilon-delta condition —

And it is time for us to introduce the concept of limit using the condition.

Once again we are walking into regions of greater and greater rigor at the expense of having to use more abstract concepts while we are doing it. Things are going to get a little harder for people that aren’t used to this types of reasoning but please bear with me and you’ll find it rewarding when you get used to it.

The point of the condition is to avoid using fuzzy concepts near, input signals, output signals, or the somewhat weak definition of limit we been using so far.

Theorem 37 (Heine’s Theorem) Let , , and . if and only if Proof: Omitted.

In case you are wondering what that means the straightforward answer is that it means exactly what you’re idea of a function having a limit in a given point is (I’m assuming you have the right idea). It tell us that if a function indeed has limit in point then, if we restrict ourselves to points near , the images of those points are all near .

Once again I tell the reader to look at this as if it were a game played between two (slightly odd) people. One of them is choosing the and the the other is choosing the . But this game isn’t just about choosing. The first player gets to choose any he wants, but the second has to choose the right that makes the condition hold.

If he can prove that he has an for every that the other player chooses than he succeeds in the game and the function does have limit at point .

Theorem 38 Let , , and . If exists and is finite, than there exists a neighborhood of where is bounded. Proof: Let . By theorem 37 with there exists such as Thus . So and is bounded in

If exists, then since in this case it is and there exists some neighborhood of where is bounded.

After this one may be interested in knowing how we can translate to a condition.

In this case we are considering only in the set and so what we get is:

Theorem 39 Let , , and . If , then . Proof: Let . By the condition it is: Thus by taking it follows or In conclusion: which is equivalent to saying that .

Definition 34 Let ; and . We say that is continuous in point if for all sequences of points in , such as it is . A function is said to be continuous if it is continuous in all points in .

A few examples to clarify definition 34

1. 

   Let and a sequence such as . Then and . In conclusion which is equivalent to saying that is continuous in . Since can be any given point is continuous in .

2. Let and a sequence such as . It is and by the same reasoning is also continuous.
3. In general if it is . So for it is .

   If it follows that and for it follows that .

   Thus if we define and it follows that it always is .

4. Analogously we can define and and it always is .

Theorem 40 (Heine’s theorem for continuity) Let , and . is continuous in if and only if Or written in terms of neighborhoods Proof: Omitted.

As can be seen the condition for continuity in point is very similar to the one for limit in point .

To finish this post I’ll just state a theorem that sheds some light on the connections of these two concepts:

Theorem 41 Let , and . Then it’s continuous in point if and only if . Proof: Omitted.

So as this theorem shows the connection between continuity and limit is indeed a deep one, but we can look at the concept of limit as being an auxiliary tool to determine if a function is continuous or not and we should not confuse them.

In the next post I intend to write a little bit more about continuity but in the mean time a very good text about it can be found here