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By the time Kepler published his work, Copernicus had already developed the heliocentric model, and Galileo was starting to gather significant observational evi
by DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
By the time Kepler published his work, Copernicus had already developed the heliocentric model, and Galileo was starting to gather significant observational evidence for heliocentrism (and had begun developing the principles of mechanics).
Kepler made a huge contribution to the development of physics, but "the new physics" was already in motion by the time he published his work, and I think it's an exaggeration to say progress of physics would have stopped without Kepler.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 2y ago>By the time Kepler published his work, Copernicus had already developed the heliocentric model The heliocentric model was an old idea anyway(Aristarchus), what Copernicus did was not that impresive since it was wrong.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoIt was an old idea that had been out of favor for two millennia. > what Copernicus did was not that impresive since it was wrong What a statement. Copernicus was more right than anyone else of his time. His model revolutionized astronomy and led to the development of modern physics.
- mananaysiempre 2y agoKepler’s half-insight, half-inferential-leap that the orbits were ellipses and not just off-center circles (made possible by the fantastic quality of the data Brahe gathered—he didn’t even have a telescope, remember) was very important to Newton’s positing the law of universal gravitation. (The universal part is much more important here, as far as a naturalist’s worldview is concerned, than the gravitation one.) See Arnold’s writings regarding just how tiny the difference is between the two possibilities. Would Kepler’s absence have stopped scientific progress? Probably not. But some very, very important parts of it would not have proceeded as they did.