Johannes Kepler was born in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg, in the Holy Roman Empire of German Nationality. Kepler came from a poor family but his intelligence got him a scholarship to the University of Tübingen to study for the Lutheran ministry. Kepler's family was Lutheran and he adhered to the Augsburg Confession a defining document for Lutheranism. During the Thirty-Years War he refused to sign the Formula of Concord which lead him to be excluded from the sacrament in the Lutheran Church. He then refused to convert to Catholicism which left him alienated during the war. Kepler was forced to leave his teaching post at Graz due to the counter Reformation because he was Lutheran and moved to Prague to work with the renowned Danish astronomer,
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Using his collected information Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, delineating his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion. And what is just as important about this work, "it is the first published account wherein a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" (O. Gingerich in foreword to Johannes Kepler New Astronomy translated by W. Donahue, Cambridge Univ Press, 1992), which today's is known as the Scientific …show more content…
The reason that the orbit of Mars was particularly difficult was that Copernicus had correctly placed the Sun at the center of the Solar System, but had an error in assuming the orbits of the planets to be circles. After a long struggle, in which he tried mightily to avoid his eventual conclusion, Kepler was forced finally to the realization that the orbits of the planets were not the circles demanded by Aristotle and assumed implicitly by Copernicus, but were instead ellipses. Kepler created the Law of Planetary Motion which has three laws that state the Sun is not at the center of the ellipse, but is instead at one focus, the line joining the Sun and planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, so the planet moves faster when it is nearer the Sun and, the ratio of the squares of the revolutionary periods for two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their semimajor
Using his collected information Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, delineating his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion. And what is just as important about this work, "it is the first published account wherein a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" (O. Gingerich in foreword to Johannes Kepler New Astronomy translated by W. Donahue, Cambridge Univ Press, 1992), which today's is known as the Scientific …show more content…
The reason that the orbit of Mars was particularly difficult was that Copernicus had correctly placed the Sun at the center of the Solar System, but had an error in assuming the orbits of the planets to be circles. After a long struggle, in which he tried mightily to avoid his eventual conclusion, Kepler was forced finally to the realization that the orbits of the planets were not the circles demanded by Aristotle and assumed implicitly by Copernicus, but were instead ellipses. Kepler created the Law of Planetary Motion which has three laws that state the Sun is not at the center of the ellipse, but is instead at one focus, the line joining the Sun and planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, so the planet moves faster when it is nearer the Sun and, the ratio of the squares of the revolutionary periods for two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their semimajor