Johannes Kepler’s contributions to renessance science

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Johannes Kepler’s contributions to renessance science

In: Physics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The ancient greek philosophers had deduced that the Earth were the center of the universe. And everyone since them agreed with them and their methods of finding truths by deduction alone. Nobody dared questioning the wisdom of Arestoteles and would be shunned by the scientific community if they did. But here comes along a group of people, most notably Copernicus, who claimed that Arestoteles was wrong and that the Sun were the center of the solar system and all the planets except the Moon revolved around it rather then the Earth. And along comes Kepler with very accurate proof of this with an almost perfect model of the solar system that were able to predict any astronomical events to extremely high accuracy. This is something which researchers have been trying to do for thousands of years. But he did so by proving the ancient philosophers wrong on such basic things. It exposed them for the hoxes they were. All the scientific literature had to be reviewed because most of it was based on things that Arestoteles had deduced or had used the same techniques of deduction as Arestoteles had done.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Science at the time of Kepler was just starting to resemble Science as we know it today, in the sense of being based on reproduceable evidence and written in the language of mathematics. Science of this era was better called “Natural Philosophy” and was closer to clever verbal debates that modern “proofs”.

There was a man at this time named Tycho Brahe, a truly wacky aristocrat worth his own ELI5. Brahe spent a ton of money building an incredible observatory and hiring astronomers to take intricate nightly measurements over the motion of the stars and planets. Kepler established himself as a brilliant mathematician and when he looked at the universe he saw math, he saw Creation as being based on Geometry, trigonometry, etc. He made some enemies with the Church for this view but nevertheless, he persisted.

Eventually Kepler came into possession of Brahe’s decades worth of measurements, and using this raw data, for the first time, applied the laws of mathematics to *explain and predict* the nature of the Universe.

He wasn’t always right, but he was clearly onto something, and served as a direct influence on Isaac Newton, arguably the single most significant human being to ever live. Isaac Newton took Kepler’s equations, theories, and methodologies and created modern Science as we know it.