Johannes Kepler Essay

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a German astronomer who believed in the heliocentric theory. Kepler is a clear example of the narrow line that separated science and religion. Nonetheless, his ideas would show that things could be solved through reason alone. He believed that the harmony of the human soul could be found through numerical relationships that existed between planets. He found that the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn all revolved at different times. For example, the earth revolved around the sun in a year while Saturn revolved around the sun in fifty years. From this, Kepler found a mathematical ratio, nine to the two-thirds power, to explain this phenomenon. This was revolutionary to humanity’s place in the universe. People were shocked that the universe could be explained by math alone rather than religion. This went strongly

Among these people were Copernicus who believed the sun was at the center of the world and the earth, stars and planets revolved around it. Danish astronomer Brahe helped contribute to this idea by contributing a large mass of data about the universe that he was able to discover. His student Kepler kept his ideas going, as he formulated many laws of planetary motion. He said the orbits around the sun were elliptical, planets don’t move in a uniform speed and the time a planet completes its orbit is related to its distance from the sun. Meanwhile, Florentine Galileo decided to use experiments to find out what happened and not what should happen, and discovered that a uniform force makes a uniform acceleration as well as inertia laws, that an object will be in motion forever unless stopped by another force.

Galileo Galilei, a distinguished polymath that contributed to the commence of modern sciences was accounted to be a heretic. In the year, 1609, the astronomer proposed a new theory reckoned as heliocentrism, the idea that claims that the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun. His theory contradicted the belief of the Catholic Church who under the influence of the Bible, believed in the theory geocentrism, therefore accounting him as a heretic. Galileo Galilei is not a heretic because his theories were based on clear empirical observations, that scientifically proved his ideas. Galileo Galilei was believed to be a heretic for opposing the belief of the Catholic Church, despite him being scientifically correct.

the heliocentric solar system. Johannes Kepler further modified the heliocentric system, by mathematically showing that the planets’ orbits are elliptical. With his invention of the telescope, Galileo made new observations about the solar system and found mathematical laws that described the movement of the planets. Later, Isaac Newton established a universal law of gravity. With the new scientific discoveries, the gap between religion and science increased. Science revolutionized the human though and its understanding of the universe.

During the time of Galileo, the church was very strict with physicists who believed in the Copernican model. This is exactly the position that Galileo found himself in. In 1600 Galileo began making his own telescope. He became the first person to point one at the night sky. What staggered him the most by doing this was the sheer volume of stars that were not visible with the naked eye. Galileo used his telescope to make many discoveries; one of these is the discovery of Jupiter’s four moons. He even plotted and tracked there rotations around Jupiter. The main thing however, was that Jupiter even had moons, this was proof that the geocentric model was incorrect and that this discovery was in favour of the Copernican model.

Johannes Kepler was a famous mathematician, best known for his works on the planetary laws of motion. During his lifetime he faced many oppositions to his work, Kepler was known to be a very quiet tempered man with little interest but his research, which was often impeded. Kepler’s personal religious beliefs were what caused him the most trouble in his professional and personal life. He was denied positions and friendships due to his Protestant beliefs; finding enemies in the Catholic church and in the Lutheran for his sympathy towards Calvinists. In addition, Kepler’s family life was increasingly problematic. His first wife often prevented him from getting work done, and two of his sons died. Finally, Kepler’s mother was accused of being a witch, this greatly affected Kepler, as he had to take time out of his research to help prove her innocence on the matter.

All his writings consisted of numerous references to God. He saw his work as a fulfilment of his Christian duty to understand the works of God. Kepler believed that God had made the Universe according to a mathematical plan. Although, Kepler did thank God for granting him insights, but the insights were still presented as rational. While studying theology at the university at Tubingen, he fell under the influence of Michael Mastlin. He then abandoned theology and became a teacher of astronomy and mathematics in Austria. Johannes Kepler’s work illustrated the narrow line that would separate magic and science in the early Scientific Revolution. Kepler compared numerical relationships between planets in harmony of the human soul. He described it as discovering the "music of the spheres." Overtime, Johannes Kepler devised the three laws of planetary motion. He confirmed Copernicus' heliocentric theory, and eliminated the scientific possibility of crystalline spheres moving in perfectly circular orbits. Eventually, Johannes Kepler’s three laws affected the eliminated idea of uniform circular motion. By the end of Kepler’s life, the Ptolemaic system rapidly lost its ground to the new ideas. Many questions do remain unanswered. However, it was an Italian scientist who achieved an important break through to a new cosmology by answering the first question and striding through the

And in 1618 Johannes Kepler confirms his previously rejected discovery of the third law of planetary motion (he first discovered it on March 8 but soon rejected the idea after some initial calculations were made).

Johannes Kepler was a man who made a surplus of achievements and discovery. What he is most known for is discovering that planets don’t go in a circular motion around the

However, Galileo did begin to mount a body of evidence that supported Copernican theory and contradicted Aristotle and Church doctrine. In 1612, he published his Discourse on Bodies in Water, this refuted the Aristotelian explanation of why objects float in water, he said it wasn’t because of their flat shape but the weight of the object in relation to the water it displaced. In 1613 He published his observations of sunspots, which further refuted Aristotelian doctrine that the sun was perfect. According to biography.com, this same year, Galileo wrote a letter o a student to explain how Copernican theory did not contradict Biblical passages, stating that scripture was written from an earthly perspective and implied that science provided a different, more accurate perspective. The letter was made public and Church Inquisition consultants pronounced Copernican theory heretical.

Prior to Galileo’s time, the Greek and medieval mind, science was a kind of formalism, a means of coordinating data, which had no bearing on the ultimate reality of things. The point was to give order to complicated data, and all that mattered was the hypothesis that was simplest to understand and most convenient. Astronomy and mathematics were regarded as the playthings of intellectuals. They were accounted as having neither philosophical nor theological relevance. There was genuine puzzlement among Churchmen that they had to get involved in a quarrel over planetary orbits.

When Kepler first began his work on the orbit of Mars he was under the assumption, as many scientists were, that the planetary orbits were circular, and that the Sun was at the center of the orbits. This type of system is called a heliocentric system. Also at this time only six planets were known. When Kepler obtained Brahe's data he discovered that the orbits were not perfect circles, but instead were ellipses that were only slightly flattened. The reason nobody else realized this was because the orbits were so slightly elliptical that extensive investigation and data would be needed to show this. It also turned out that the reason the orbit of Mars was very difficult to understand was because its orbit was more eccentric than the other planets that Kepler and Brahe had data about. To understand a lot of Kepler's work you must first

The scientific revolution was one of the greatest times in the 16th century and its ideals have proved to last to this very day. The great minds of the scientific revolution brought forth new concepts and vastly complex while each one is rooted in a basic fundamental. Some of these ideas and fundamentals were of the outside world, aka space, the planet and the stars, motion, and physics. One of the best minds of this time was, of course, Galileo Galilei. This great astronomer was a marvel at his work, he introduced controversial concepts that the church did not accept but those that he believed were to be true. Written by Galileo himself, this letter to the Grand Duchess professed his great discoveries and how they changed old ideas and

Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer and mathematician who lived between 1671-1630. Kepler was a Copernican and initially believed that planets should follow perfectly circular orbits (“Johan Kepler” 1). During this time period, Ptolemy’s geocentric theory of the solar system was accepted. Ptolemy’s theory stated that Earth is at the center of the universe and stationary; closest to Earth is the Moon, and beyond it, expanding towards the outside, are Mercury, Venus, and the Sun in a straight line, followed by Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the “fixed stars”. The Ptolemaic system explained the numerous observed motions of the planets as having small spherical orbits called epicycles (“Astronomy” 2). Kepler is best known for introducing three

After Tycho’s death, his assistant, young mathematician Johannes Kepler used Tycho’s observations and came up with his First Law that orbits of the planets are elliptical instead of round like Copernicus believed. With his Second Law, Kepler stated that the speed of the planets depends on their distance from the sun which helped English astronomer and physicist Isaac Newton, to come up with his Law of Universal Gravitation.