The Music of The Spherical Harmonics

Eddie’s diner serves tasty pizza, but his music playlist’s tasty, too — heavy with small-group vocals.  We’re talking atomic structure but suddenly Vinnie surprises me.  “Whoa, she’s got a hot voice!”


“That girl who’s singing.”

“Which one?  That’s a quartet.”

“The alto.”

“How can you pick one voice out of that close-harmony performance?”

“By listening!  She’s the only one singing those notes.”

“You’re hearing a chaotic sound wave yet you can pick out just one sound.”

“Yeah, just her special notes.”

“Interesting thing is, atoms do that, too.  Think about, say, a uranium atom, 92 electrons attracted by the nucleus, repelled by every other electron, all dashing about in the nuclear field and getting in each other’s way.  Think that’d be a nice, orderly picture?”

“Sure not.  It’d be, like you say, chaotic.”

“But just like we can describe a messy sound wave as a combination of frequencies, we can describe that atom’s electron structure as a combination of basic patterns.”  I pull Old Reliable from its holster and bring up an image.  “Here’s something I built for a presentation.  It’s a little busy so I’ll walk you through it.”Shell levels

“Busy, uh-huh.”

“Start with those blue circles.  They look familiar?”

“Right, they’re Laplace’s spherical patterns.  You got them sorted by how many blue spaces they got.”

“Yup.  Blue represents a node, a 2-D region where the value touches or crosses zero.  There are patterns with three or more nodes, but I ran out of space and patience to draw them.  Laplace showed there’s an infinite number of candidate patterns as you add more and more nodes.  You can describe any physically reasonable distribution around the central point as some combination of his patterns.”

“Why’d you draw them on stair-steps?”

“Because each step (we call it a shell) is at a different potential energy level.  Suppose, for instance, that there’s charge in that one-node pattern.  Moving it away from the nucleus puts a node there.  That’ll cost some energy and shift charge to the two-node shell.  To exclude it from there and also from another node, say a larger spherical surface, would take even more energy, and so on.”

“How is that potential energy?”

“We’re comparing shell energy to the energy of an electron that’s far away.  It’s like gravitational potential energy, maybe the energy a space rock converts to kinetic energy as it falls to Earth.  Call the far-away energy zero.  The numbers get more and more negative as the rock or the charge get closer to the center of attraction.”

“Ah, so that’s why you’ve got minus signs in the picture.”

“Exactly.  See zero at the top of the stairs?  With a hydrogen atom, for instance, an electron would give up 13.6 electron-volts of energy to get close to the nucleus in that 1-node pattern.  Conversely, it’d take 13.6 eV to rip that charge completely away.”

“If the 13.6 is what you’re calling ‘Minimum’, why not just write ‘–13.6’ in there?”

“It’s a different number for different atoms and even ions.  Astronomers see all kinds of ions with every amount of charge so they have to keep things general in their calculations.”

“What are those fractions about?  Wait, don’t tell me, I can figure this.  Each divisor is the square of its node count.  Are those the 1/n² numbers from whosit’s formula?”

Rydberg’s.  You’re on the right track, keep going.”

“If the minimum is 13.6 eV, the diagram says that the two-node shell is … 3.4 eV down from the top and … 10.2 eV up from the bottom.  And from what we said about the hydrogen spectrum, I’ll bet that 10.2 eV jump is the first line in that, was it the Ly series, the one in the ultra-violet?”

“Bravo, Vinnie!  The Lyman series it is.  Excellent memory for detail there.”

“I noticed something else.  You carefully didn’t say we moved an electron between shells.”

“That’s an important point.  At the atomic size scale we can’t treat the electron as a particle moving around.  Lightwaves act to turn off one shell and excite another one, like your singer exciting a different note.”

“Yes, she does.”

~~ Rich Olcott

  • Thanks to the Molnars for a delightful meal, and to their dinner party guests the Jumps for instigating this post.

Weight And Wait, Two Aspects of Time

I was deep in the library stacks, hunting down a journal article so old it hadn’t been digitized yet.  As I rounded the corner of Aisle 5 Section 2, there he was, leaning against a post and holding a clipboard.

“Vinnie?  What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you.  You weren’t in your office.”

“But how…?  Never mind.  What can I do for you?”

“It’s the time-dilation thing.  You said that there’s two kinds, a potential energy kind and a kinetic energy kind, but you only told me about the first one.”

“Hey, Ramona broke up that conversation, don’t blame me.  You got blank paper on that clipboard?”

“Sure.  Here.”

“Quick review — we said that potential energy only depends on where you are.  Suppose you and a clock are at some distance r away from a massive object like that Gargantua black hole, and my clock is way far away.  I see your clock ticking slower than mine.  The ratio of their ticking rates, tslow/tfast = √[1-(2G·M/r·c²)], only depends on the slow clock’s position.  Suppose you move even closer to the massive object.  That r-value gets smaller, the fraction inside the parentheses gets closer to 1, the square root gets smaller and I see your clock slow down even more.  Sound familiar?”

“Yeah, but what about the kinetic thing?”time-and-the-rovers

“I’m getting there.  You know Einstein’s famous EEinstein=m·c² equation.  See?  The formula contains neither a velocity nor a position.  That means EEinstein is the energy content of a particle that’s not moving and not under the influence of any gravitational or other force fields.  Under those conditions the object is isolated from the Universe and we call m its rest mass.  We good?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“OK, remember the equation for gravitational potential energy?”


“Let’s call that Egravity.  Now what’s the ratio between gravitational potential energy and the rest-mass energy?”

“Uh … Egravity/EEinstein = G·M·m/r·m·c² = G·M/r·c². Hey, that’s exactly half the fraction inside the square root up there. tslow/tfast = √[1-(2 Egravity/EEinstein)].  Cool.”

“Glad you like it.  Now, with that under our belts we’re ready for the kinetic thing.  What’s Newton’s equation for the kinetic energy of an object that has velocity v?”


“I thought you’d know that.  Let’s call it Ekinetic.  Care to take a stab at the equation for kinetic time dilation?”

“As a guess, tslow/tfast = √[1-(2 Ekinetic/EEinstein)]. Hey, if I plug in the formulas for each of the energies, the halves and the mass cancel out and I get tslow/tfast = √[1-2(½m·v²/m·c²)] = √[1-(v²/c²)].  Is that it?”

“Close.  In Einstein’s math the kinetic energy expression is more complicated, but it leads to the same formula as yours.  If the velocity’s zero, the square root is 1.0 and there’s no time-slowing.  If the object’s moving at light-speed (v=c), the square root is zero and the slow clock is infinitely slow.  What’s interesting is that an object’s rest energy acts like a universal energy yardstick — both flavors of time-slowing are governed by how the current energy quantity compares to EEinstein.”

“Wait — kinetic energy depends on velocity, right, which means that it’ll look different from different inertial frames.  Does that mean that the kinetic time-slowing depends on the frames, too?”

“Sure it does.  Best case is if we’re both in the same frame, which means I see you in straight-line motion.  Each of us would get the same number if we measure the other’s velocity.  Plug that into the equation and each of us would see the same tslow for the other’s clock.  If we’re not doing uniform straight lines then we’re in different frames and our two dilation measurements won’t agree.”

“… Ramona doesn’t dance in straight lines, does she, Sy?”

“That reminds me of Einstein’s quote — ‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.‘  You’re thinking curves now, eh?”

“Are you boys discussing me?”

<unison> “Oh, hi, Ramona.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Three Body Problems

The local science museum had a showing of the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar so of course I went to see it again.  Awesome visuals and (mostly) good science because Nolan had tapped the expertise of Dr Kip Thorne, one of the primary creators of LIGO.  On the way out, Vinnie collared me.

“Hey, Sy, ‘splain something to me.”

“I can try, but first let’s get out of the weather.  Al’s coffee OK with you?”

“Yeah, sure, if his scones are fresh-baked.”

Al saw me walking in.  “Hey, Sy, you’re in luck, I just pulled a tray of cinnamon scones out of the oven.”  Then he saw Vinnie.  “Aw, geez, there go my paper napkins again.”

Vinnie was ready.  “Nah, we’ll use the backs of some ad flyers I grabbed at the museum.  And gimme, uh, two of the cinnamons and a large coffee, black.”

“Here you go.”

At our table I said, “So what’s the problem with the movie?”

“Nobody shrank.  All this time we been talking about how things get smaller in a strong gravity field.  That black hole, Gargantua, was huge.  The museum lecture guy said it was like 100 million times as heavy as the Sun.  When the people landed on its planet they should have been teeny but everything was just regular-size.  And what’s up with that ‘one hour on the planet is seven years back home’ stuff?”

“OK, one thing at a time.  When the people were on the planet, where was the movie camera?”

“On the planet, I suppose.”

“Was the camera influenced by the same gravitational effects that the people were?”

“Ah, it’s the frames thing again, ain’t it?  I guess in the on-planet inertial frame everything stays the relative size they’re used to, even though when we look at the planet from our far-away frame we see things squeezed together.”

(I’ve told you that Vinnie’s smart.)  “You got it.  OK, now for the time thing.  By the way, it’s formally known as ‘time dilation.’  Remember the potential energy/kinetic energy distinction?”

“Yeah.  Potential energy depends on where you are, kinetic energy depends on how you’re moving.”

“Got it in one.  It turns out that energy and time are deeply intertwined all through physics.  Would you be surprised if I told you that there are two kinds of time dilation, one related to gravitational potential and the other to velocity?”

“Nothing would surprise me these days.  Go on.”

“The gravity one dropped out of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity.  The velocity one arose from his General Relativity work.”  I grabbed one of those flyers.  “Ready for a little algebra?”

“Geez.  OK, I asked for it.”gargantua-3
“You certainly did.  I’ll just give you the results, and mind you these apply only near a non-rotating sphere with no electric charge.  Things get complicated otherwise.  Suppose the sphere has mass M and you’re circling around it at a distance r from its geometric center.  You’ve got a metronome ticking away at n beats per your second and you’re perfectly happy with that.  We good?”

“So far.”

“I’m watching you from way far away.  I see your metronome running slow, at only n√[1-(2 G·M/r·c²)] beats per my second.  G is Newton’s gravity constant, c is the speed of light.  See how the square root has to be less than 1?”

“Your speed of light or my speed of light?”

“Good question, considering we’re talking about time and space getting all contorted, but Einstein guarantees that both of us measure exactly the same speed.  So anyway, in the movie both the Miller’s Planet landing team and that poor guy left on good ship  Endurance are circling Gargantua.  Earth observers would see both their clocks running slow.  But Endurance is much further out (larger r, smaller fraction) from Gargantua than Miller’s Planet is.  Endurance’s distance gave its clock more beats per Earth second than the planet gets, which is why the poor guy aged so much waiting for the team to return.”

“I wondered about that.”

Then we heard Ramona’s husky contralto.  “Hi, guys.  Al said you were back here talking physics.  Who wants to take me dancing?”

We both stood up, quickly.

“Whee, this’ll be fun.”

~~ Rich Olcott

A Matter of Perspective


“Keep movin’, I gotchur bag.”













“Do you remember the formula for kinetic energy?”











(sound of footsteps)

(sound of door)

“Don’t mention it.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Ya got potential, kid, but how much?

Dusk at the end of January, not my favorite time of day or year.  I was just closing up the office when I heard a familiar footstep behind me.  “Hi, Vinnie.  What’s up?”

“Energy, Sy.”


“Energy and LIGO.  Back in flight school we learned all about trading off kinetic energy and potential energy.  When I climb I use up the fuel’s chemical energy to gain gravitational potential energy.  When I dive I convert gravitational potential energy into  kinetic energy ’cause I speed up.  Simple.”

“So how do you think that ties in with LIGO?”

“OK, back when we pretended we was in those two space shuttles (which you sneaky-like used to represent photons in a LIGO) and I got caught in that high-gravity area where space is compressed, we said that in my inertial frame I’m still flying at the same speed but in your inertial frame I’ve slowed down.”

“Yeah, that’s what we worked out.”

“Well, if I’m flying into higher gravity, that’s like diving, right, ’cause I’m going where gravity is stronger like closer to the Earth, so I’m losing gravitational potential energy.  But if I’m slowing down I’ve gotta be losing kinetic energy, too, right?  So how can they both happen?  And how’s it work with photons?”

“Interesting questions, Vinnie, but I’m hungry.  How about some dinner?”shuttle-escape-1

We took the elevator down to Eddie’s pizza joint on the second floor.  I felt heavier already.  We ordered, ate and got down to business.

“OK, Vinnie.  Energy with photons is different than with objects that have mass, so let’s start with the flying-objects case.  How do you calculate gravitational potential energy?”

“Like they taught us in high school, Sy, ‘little g’ times mass times the height, and ‘little g’ is some number I forget.”

“Not a problem, we’ll just suppose that ‘little g’ times your plane’s mass is some convenient number, like 1,000.  So your gravitational potential energy is 1000×height, where the height’s in feet and the unit of energy is … call it a fidget.  OK?”

“Saves having to look up that number.”

Vinnie’s route, courtesy of Google Earth

“Fine.  Let’s suppose you’re flying over San Francisco Bay and your radar altimeter reads 20,000 feet.  What’s your gravitational potential energy?”

“Uhh… twenty million fidgets.”

“Great.  You maintain level flight to Denver.  As you pass over the Rockies you notice your altimeter now reads 6,000 feet because of that 14,000-foot mountain you’re flying over.  What’s your gravitational potential energy?”

“Six million fidgets.  Or is it still twenty?”

“Well, if God forbid you were to drop out of the sky, would you hit the ground harder in California or Colorado?”

“California, of course.  I’d fall more than three times as far.”

“So what you really care about isn’t some absolute amount of potential energy, it’s the relative amount of smash you experience if you fall down this far or that far.  ‘Height’ in the formula isn’t some absolute height, it’s height above wherever your floor is.  Make sense?”


“That’s an essential characteristic of potential energy — electric, gravitational, chemical, you name it.   It’s only potential.  You can’t assign a value without stating the specific transition you’re interested in.  You don’t know voltages in a circuit until you put a resistance between two specific points and meter the current through it.  You don’t know gravitational potential energy until you decide what location you want to compare it with.”

“And I suppose a uranium atom’s nuclear energy is only potential until a nuke or something sets it off.”

“You got the idea.  So, when you flew into that high-gravity compressed-space sector, what happened to your gravitational potential energy?”

“Like I said, it’s like I’m in a dive so I got less, right?”

“Depends on what you’re going to fall onto, doesn’t it?”

“No, wait, it’s definitely less ’cause I gotta use energy to fly back out to flat space.”

“OK, you’re comparing here to far away.  That’s legit.  But where’s that energy go?”

“Ahh, you’re finally getting to the kinetic energy side of my question –”

“Whoa, look at the time!  Got a plane to catch.  We’ll pick this up next week.  Bye.”

“Hey, Sy, your tab! …  Phooey, stuck for it again.”

~~ Rich Olcott

What’s that funnel about, really?

If you’ve ever watched or read a space opera (oh yes, you have), you know about the gravity well that a spacecraft has to climb out of when leaving a planet.  Every time I see the Museum’s gravity well model (photo below), I’m reminded of all the answers the guy gave to, “Johnny, what can you make of this?

The model’s a great visitor-attracter with those “planets” whizzing around the “Sun,” but this one exhibit really represents several distinct concepts.   For some of them it’s not quite the right shape.DMNS gravity well

The simplest concept is geometrical.  “Down” is the direction you move when gravity’s pulling on you.

HS cone
Gravitational potential energy change
for small height differences

A gravity well model for that concept would be just a straight line between you and the neighborhood’s most intense gravity source.

You learned the second concept in high school physics class.  Any object has gravitational potential energy that measures the amount of energy it would give up on falling.  Your teacher probably showed you the equation GPE = m·g·h, where m is the mass of the object, h is its height above ground level, and g is a constant you may have determined in a lab experiment.

If the width of the gravity well model at a given height represents GPE at that level, the model is a simple straight-sided cone.

Newton energy cone
Gravitational potential energy change
for large height differences
The h indicates
an approximately linear range
where the HS equation could apply.

But of course it’s not that simple.  Newton’s Law of Gravity says that the potential energy at any height r away from the planet’s center is proportional to 1/r.

Hmm… that looks different from the “proportional to h” equation.  Which is right?

Both equations are valid, but over different distance scales.  The HS teachers didn’t quite lie to you, but they didn’t give you the complete picture either.  Your classroom was about 4000 miles (21,120,000 feet) from Earth’s center, whereas the usual experiments involve height differences of at most a dozen feet.  Even the 20-foot drop from a second-story window is less than a millionth of the way down to Earth’s center.

Check my numbers:

Height h 1/(r+h)
× 108
Difference in 1/(r+h)
× 1014
0 4.734,848,484 0
20 4.734,844,001 4.48
40 4.734,839,517 8.97
60 4.734,835,033 13.45
80 4.734,830,549 17.93
100 4.734,826,066 22.42

rh lineSure enough, that’s a straight line (see the chart).  Reminds me of how Newton’s Law of Gravity is valid except at very short distances.  The HS Law of Gravity works fine for small spans but when the distances get big we have to use Newton’s equation.

We’re not done yet. That curvy funnel-shaped gravity well model could represent the force of gravity rather than its potential energy.  Newton told us that the force goes as 1/r2 so it decreases much more rapidly than the potential energy does as you get further away.  The gravity force well has a correspondingly sharper curve to it than the gravity energy well.

Newton force cone
The force of gravity
or an embedding diagram

The funnel model could also represent the total energy required to get a real spacecraft off the surface and up into space.  Depending on which sci-fi gimmickry is in play, the energy may come from a chemical or ion rocket, an electromagnetic railgun, or even a tractor beam from some mothership way up there.

No matter the technology, the theoretical energy requirement to get to a given height is the same.  In practice, however, each technology is optimal for some situations but forbiddingly inefficient in others.  Thus, each technology’s funnel  has its own shape and that shape will change depending on the setting.

In modern physics, the funnel model could also represent Einstein’s theory of how a mass “bends” the space around it.  (Take a look at this post, which is about how mass curves space by changing the local distance scale.)  Cosmologists describe the resulting “shapes” with embedding diagrams that are essentially 2D pictures of 3D (or 4D) contour plots.  The contours are closest together where space is most compressed, just as lines showing a steep hillside on a landscape contour map are close together.

The ED around a non-spinning object looks just like the force model picture above.  No surprise — gravitational force is how we we perceive spatial curvature.

~~ Rich Olcott