The department of Physics, School of Arts and Sciences, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, organized a webinar on Hidden Symmetry in Planetary Motion on May 5, 2021 by Prof. V. Balakrishnan, Professor Emeritus, IIT Madras.

Prof. V. Balakrishnan has received high accolades for his teaching at IIT Madras, and his lectures at numerous courses sponsored by the UGC, DST (SERC) and ICTP (Trieste, Italy) have been well-received by their attendees. He has given 7 video courses under the auspices of the NPTEL programme of MHRD (available on YouTube). These have received very high acclaim, with a total of more than 3 million views worldwide. He has been a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences since 1985.

Abstract

In this talk, we shall revisit the classical problem of planetary motion and Kepler’s Laws. The focus will be on the conserved quantities — the Hamiltonian, the orbital angular momentum, and the Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector — and the role played by these in generating the kinematical and dynamical symmetry of the system. The deep connection between the notions of integrability, symmetry, invariance and conservation will be clarified.