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eBook details

• Title: Kepler and the Laws of Nature (Essay)
• Author : Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
• Release Date : January 01, 2011
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 186 KB

Description

In 1609, the same year in which Galileo and others began to use the telescope for astronomical purposes, Johannes Kepler published his Commentary on the Motions of Mars, a book today generally cited by its short title, Astronomia nova. But that abbreviated title conceals its real challenge to the Aristotelian order of things. Kepler's work was truly the "new astronomy," but the title goes on, "based on causes, or celestial physics," and it was the introduction of physics into astronomy that was Kepler's most fundamental contribution. Aristotle's De coelo, "On the heavens," which dealt with the geometrical motions in the heavens, was the province of astronomy professors. However, it was his Metaphysics that concerned the fundamental reasons for the motions--Aristotle implied that it was the love of God that made the spheres go round (1)-and Metaphysics was the property of the philosophy professors. Kepler unified this dichotomy, demanding physically coherent explanations as to why planets sometimes went faster than at other times. He realized that when Mars was closest to the sun, it went fastest in its orbit. It seemed to him unreasonable that the earth, on the contrary, would always travel at the same speed regardless of its distance from the sun. And when he got that straightened out, he single-handedly improved the accuracy of predicted positions by an order of magnitude. You may have thought that finding the elliptical shape of Mars' orbit made the major leap forward in accuracy. Wrong! It was getting the earth's orbit positioned correctly. His teacher Michael Maestlin criticized him for mixing up physics and astronomy, (2) but it was this insight that drove Kepler to his major break throughs. And that approach laid the essential framework for Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton.

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