STS112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Ellipse
8 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Week 5: Kepler
Kepler
• Born in Weil-der-Stadt in South-western Germany, he worked around the same time as Galileo
• Was noted as an intellectually talented child and received a scholarship to study at the University of
Tubingen where he added an interest in mathematics and astronomy to his theological studies
• Wide natural philosophical interests, astronomer, mathematician and astrologer, also interested in trying to
understand physical causes for natural phenomena
• Believed in the importance of immaterial or spiritual forces in nature that worked according to mathematical
laws
• Kepler was supportive of the Copernican system but was particularly concerned with explaining the
movements of the planets in physical terms and took a God’s eye view of the Cosmos – he was obsessed
with accuracy and obsession with finding harmonies
Kepler’s Planetary Laws
• Tycho assigned Kepler the task of working out the details of the orbit of Mars
• Each planet moves in an orbit which is an ellipse and the sun is at one focus of the ellipse
• A planet moves faster when it is closer to the sun and slower when further away. If an imaginary line
connected a planet to the sun as the planet moves on its elliptical orbit in any two equal intervals of time the
line sweeps out equal areas
Spiritual Forces
• Believed that the Sun supplied a spiritual force to the Universe which influenced the motion of the planets –
The sun gives off light in all directions and also gives off a planet moving force
• The mixture of pushing and pulling forces explain the causes of planetary motion
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Kepler: born in weil-der-stadt in south-western germany, he worked around the same time as galileo, was noted as an intellectually talented child and received a scholarship to study at the university of. If an imaginary line connected a planet to the sun as the planet moves on its elliptical orbit in any two equal intervals of time the line sweeps out equal areas. Spiritual forces: believed that the sun supplied a spiritual force to the universe which influenced the motion of the planets .
