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I must mention about the 400 odd year commemoration of J. Kepler, inventor of the elliptical orbit. Until then, Everyone used the Pythagorean model universe with everything going round the earth, Except Tycho Brahe who insisted that, while the planets went around the sun, the sun went around the earth. He vilified in the Dutch press any scientist who contradicted this and would have burned them at the stake, were it not that he had to stay hidden, as the catholic church refusing to see his planets round the sun model as anything but heretical, wanted to burn him too, and of course, on general principles, because he was a protestant.
Of course, in the end everyone went for Copernicusses Heliocentric system because, it was much simpler than the Ptolemy - Tycho hybrid and therefore cheaper to run. The maintenance costs of the other system were - like the system itself, astronomical.
In fact it was too simple, and the Philosophers of natural science found themselves having to do commercials for soap powder and toothpaste to keep the wolf from the door (in renaissance Germany this was a serious problem).
Until Kepler devised his much more complicated and cranky elliptical method, which was so awkward that it took constant work to keep the system running, let alone endless hours of explanation before anyone could even understand it.
Thus Kepler's became the preferred model, and if the elliptical orbits meant that we now had terrible cold winter weather to put up with, whereas under the Ptolemaic and even Copernican regime, the weather was warm and sunny, in accordance with Graeco -Roman statutes on climate, this was felt to be a small price for everyone else to pay to keep natural philosophers in the manner to which they soon became accustomed for the rest of their lives.
Kepler narrowly escaped being dragged out of bed and used as an impromptu street -lamp by Vatican assassins, since the Pope, realizing that he was the only one who still thought the sun went around the earth, gave in and let the proscription 'lapse' which meant that he never said it was rescinded, but it was just filed and forgotten, except by atheists professors who were just nastily persecuting the inoffensive church.
This meant that Kepler could follow up his tractate on the wonky wheels of the planetary system in which (in a futile attempt to avoid being put on the St. Peter's Hit List) he swore that the planets movements were all guided by 'souls', (1) with a sequel in which he said frankly that there were no souls and the planets were moved by 'Forces' (2) . For which he admitted he had no more evidence than for 'souls' but at least it wasn't licking the red boots of the pope.
(1) "...we must choose between two assumptions: either the souls which move the planets are the less active the farther the planet is removed from the sun, or there is only one moving soul in the center of all the orbits, that is the sun, which drives the planet the more vigorously the closer the planet is, but whose force is quasi-exhausted when acting on the outer planets because of the long distance and the weakening of the force which it entails." (in ref. 1, p 261)
(2) he stated that such souls "do not exist" and added:
"If we substitute for the word "soul" the word "force" then we get just the principle which underlies my physics of the skies...For once I firmly believed that the motive force of a planet was a soul...Yet as I reflected that this cause of motion diminishes in proportion to distance, just as the light of the sun diminishes in proportion to distance from the sun, I came to the conclusion that this force must be something substantial-"substantial" not in the literal sense but...in the same manner as we say that light is something substantial, meaning by this an unsubstantial entity emanating from a substantial body."
No prob. Just a bit of (serious ) fun.
Star of Bethlehem you tube..must look it up. It was a comet?
Hi Arq,
I had a feeling you didn't watch that youtube link..I really did, when you
never made a comment about it in some thread we were on together.
When you watch it lemme know...it clearly shows it was no comet...couldn't have been.
All because of Kepler's brilliant mind...adjusted a bit by Newton...math used by NASA
today!!!
Not one of my friends ever bothered to watch the youtube when they saw it was an hr and 7 minutes!
I couldn't stop watching it, the presenter was great, fast talker.
Btw, it is a misnomer...bec he also uses Kepler's math (a computer program) to
show what the sky looked like when JC was on the cross, (recalling all the discriptions of
the earth shaking) ....and what
the sky looked like to John on Patmos all those decades later...he deduced and researched quite a bit...
It is really really fascinating and right up your intellectual, inquisitive alley...
He was backed by professional docu film makers, it is obviously that well done.
Enjoy.
I must mention about the 400 odd year commemoration of J. Kepler, inventor of the elliptical orbit. Until then, Everyone used the Pythagorean model universe with everything going round the earth, Except Tycho Brahe who insisted that, while the planets went around the sun, the sun went around the earth. He vilified in the Dutch press any scientist who contradicted this and would have burned them at the stake, were it not that he had to stay hidden, as the catholic church refusing to see his planets round the sun model as anything but heretical, wanted to burn him too, and of course, on general principles, because he was a protestant.
It is ironic, as you say. But then he was lucky to be born after the 18th c. not before it, or he would have been known not as the inventor of the expanding universe, but the inventor of the self -igniting firelighter.
Hi Arq,
I had a feeling you didn't watch that youtube link..I really did, when you
never made a comment about it in some thread we were on together.
When you watch it lemme know...it clearly shows it was no comet...couldn't have been.
All because of Kepler's brilliant mind...adjusted a bit by Newton...math used by NASA
today!!!
Not one of my friends ever bothered to watch the youtube when they saw it was an hr and 7 minutes!
I couldn't stop watching it, the presenter was great, fast talker.
Btw, it is a misnomer...bec he also uses Kepler's math (a computer program) to
show what the sky looked like when JC was on the cross, (recalling all the discriptions of
the earth shaking) ....and what
the sky looked like to John on Patmos all those decades later...he deduced and researched quite a bit...
It is really really fascinating and right up your intellectual, inquisitive alley...
He was backed by professional docu film makers, it is obviously that well done.
Enjoy.
I have to confess that (should you actually give the link) I will probably not watch it either, any more than I would watch a documentary on how Spiderman might have to construct his webs -cords.
"Recent experiments in The US with liquefied kevlar, taken together with research in China into high- pressure nano -nozzles for spinning artificial silk is adequate scientific support for the evidence in the Spiderman 'document' (50 cents a copy) to be regarded as proven truth..."
it is ironic, as you say. But then he was lucky to be born after the 18th c. Not before it, or he would have been known not as the inventor of the expanding universe, but the inventor of the self -igniting firelighter.
I was first introduced to the story of Kepler and Brahe by watching Carl Sagan's cosmos DVD. It made his story and theories stick in my memory though.
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) fun. 
