What were johanne keplers accomplishments?

Answer 1

Kepler was a math and paperwork nerd. He fits into the history of science something like this: (Some of the following may be myths and old wives' tales, but the astronomy is accurate): The story begins with Tycho Brahe, who was hot-tempered in his youth and wound up losing his nose in a grudge-match fought with swords. He was rich enough to get himself fitted with a fake nose, but remained so self-conscious that he became a hermit and never had anything to do with normal society. The main thing he did (that we care about) for the rest of his life was to observe the positions of the planets in the sky night after night, and keep detailed records. This was all before telescopes. Tycho saw exactly the same things in the sky that you can see tonight in a dark place, but he kept methodical, detailed records of what he saw. At that time in history, the accepted concept of the solar system was that the earth is at the center and everything we see in the sky revolves around the earth. The problem was that in order to explain the screwy motions of the planets that we actually see in the sky, you had to accept some really unbelievable and complicated ideas of how the planets actually moved, like riding little wheels attached to bigger wheels. Kepler inherited Tycho's notebooks, containing the records of his years and years of observing the motions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn through the stars. From these countless pages of numbers and sketches, Kepler squeezed out a completely different concept of how the solar system could be structured. The picture that Kepler presented was this: 1). The sun is the center of the solar system, not the earth. The planets travel around the sun in orbits that are ellipses. The earth is one of the planets. 2). As a planet orbits the sun, a line from the sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal periods of time. That means the planet travels slower when it's further from the sun, and faster when it's nearer the sun. 3). There is an exact formula that ties together the planet's orbital period and its distance from the sun. (T2 / R3 = constant) That's all there is to it. These statements are "Kepler's Laws". They match the observed motions of the planets ... including the planets that neither Tycho nor Kepler ever saw ... and they're much simpler than anything else ever presented to explain what people had seen in the sky for thousands of years. Now the punchline: Kepler derived his 'laws' by going over Tycho's notebooks and dragging a 'system' out of the piles of numbers that Tycho had gathered. He never offered any suggestion of WHY it should work this way; he only showed that it does. Then, a hundred years after Kepler, along came Newton. Newton concocted the idea of gravity ... a force that pulls masses toward each other ... and as he developed his idea and followed it far enough, he showed that masses in space moving according to gravity MUST move according to Kepler's Laws. Tycho wrote down what he saw, Kepler found simple rules that could describe WHAT, and Newton showed WHY.

Answer 2

Kepler was a math and paperwork nerd. He fits into the history of science something like this: (Some of the following may be myths and old wives' tales, but the astronomy is accurate): The story begins with Tycho Brahe, who was hot-tempered in his youth and wound up losing his nose in a grudge-match fought with swords. He was rich enough to get himself fitted with a fake nose, but remained so self-conscious that he became a hermit and never had anything to do with normal society. The main thing he did (that we care about) for the rest of his life was to observe the positions of the planets in the sky night after night, and keep detailed records. This was all before telescopes. Tycho saw exactly the same things in the sky that you can see tonight in a dark place, but he kept methodical, detailed records of what he saw. At that time in history, the accepted concept of the solar system was that the earth is at the center and everything we see in the sky revolves around the earth. The problem was that in order to explain the screwy motions of the planets that we actually see in the sky, you had to accept some really unbelievable and complicated ideas of how the planets actually moved, like riding little wheels attached to bigger wheels. Kepler inherited Tycho's notebooks, containing the records of his years and years of observing the motions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn through the stars. From these countless pages of numbers and sketches, Kepler squeezed out a completely different concept of how the solar system could be structured. The picture that Kepler presented was this: 1). The sun is the center of the solar system, not the earth. The planets travel around the sun in orbits that are ellipses. The earth is one of the planets. 2). As a planet orbits the sun, a line from the sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal periods of time. That means the planet travels slower when it's further from the sun, and faster when it's nearer the sun. 3). There is an exact formula that ties together the planet's orbital period and its distance from the sun. (T2 / R3 = constant) That's all there is to it. These statements are "Kepler's Laws". They match the observed motions of the planets ... including the planets that neither Tycho nor Kepler ever saw ... and they're much simpler than anything else ever presented to explain what people had seen in the sky for thousands of years. Now the punchline: Kepler derived his 'laws' by going over Tycho's notebooks and dragging a 'system' out of the piles of numbers that Tycho had gathered. He never offered any suggestion of WHY it should work this way; he only showed that it does. Then, a hundred years after Kepler, along came Newton. Newton concocted the idea of gravity ... a force that pulls masses toward each other ... and as he developed his idea and followed it far enough, he showed that masses in space moving according to gravity MUST move according to Kepler's Laws. Tycho wrote down what he saw, Kepler found simple rules that could describe WHAT, and Newton showed WHY.