Kepler

German astronomer Johannes Kepler embraced Copernicanism wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, he may be considered the last astronomer, and one of the greatest astronomers, in the old tradition—one of the last for whom the Almagest was still a part of the research literature. Kepler had begun with an interest in cosmology, in trying to understand God’s architecture for the solar system. Why, for example, were there six planets rather than some other number? Going back to speculations introduced by Plato and the Pythagoreans, Kepler applied first the geometry of the regular solids and then musical harmonies to explain various aspects of the universe. For example, there were six planets because there were only five regular solids (cube, tetrahedron, etc.), which God had used as spacers between the planetary orbs when working out the cosmic architecture. Kepler’s first book, Mysterium cosmographicum (“Cosmographic Mystery,” 1596), was based on this idea. As a result of this book, Kepler received an invitation to work with Tycho Brahe, but nothing happened until 1600, when Tycho left his native Denmark and relocated to Prague under the patronage of the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II.

Kepler went to Prague, hoping to obtain from Tycho better values of planetary parameters so that he could refine his cosmology. The collaboration lasted only a short time, because Tycho died in 1601. When Kepler arrived in Prague, Tycho and his assistants were involved in observations of Mars, which was then about to make a near approach to Earth. This turned out to be fortunate for Kepler, because only Mars and Mercury have large enough eccentricities to make the departures of their orbits from circularity appreciable and Mercury is too near the Sun to be easily or often observed. After Tycho’s death Kepler gained access to his observation records. Far from being able to find ready results to use in cosmology, Kepler was forced to analyze many observations to put them into usable form.

Kepler began as a convinced Copernican, so he put the Sun in the middle of his system, but for technical details he went back to Ptolemy. Kepler began by regarding Mars as moving on a circle that was slightly off-centre from the Sun and was following Ptolemy’s equant law. But he was unable to get this theory to match all of Tycho’s observations to better than about 8 minutes of arc (1 minute of arc = 1/60 of a degree), and he believed that Tycho’s observations were good to about 2 minutes of arc. Against his will he was forced to reexamine the fundamentals of planetary motion. This led to the first two of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, published in Astronomia Nova (New Astronomy, 1609). According to the first law, the paths of planets are ellipses with one focus located at the Sun. The second law, which was actually discovered first, makes a small improvement on Ptolemy’s equant: a planet moves around the Sun at a variable speed in such a way that the line from the Sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times. In Harmonice Mundi (The Harmony of the World, 1619), Kepler announced his third, or harmonic, law: the ratio a³/T² is the same for all planets, where a is the semimajor axis of a planet’s elliptical orbit and T is the orbital period.