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N0KFQ > TODAY 27.04.14 19:01l 55 Lines 2585 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Apr 27
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Apr 27, 4977 B.C.:
Universe is created, according to Kepler
On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to
German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a
founder of modern science. Kepler is best known for his theories
explaining the motion of planets.
Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Germany.
As a university student, he studied the Polish astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus' theories of planetary ordering. Copernicus
(1473-1543) believed that the sun, not the earth, was the center
of the solar system, a theory that contradicted the prevailing
view of the era that the sun revolved around the earth.
In 1600, Kepler went to Prague to work for Danish astronomer
Tycho Brahe, the imperial mathematician to Rudolf II, emperor of
the Holy Roman Empire. Kepler's main project was to investigate
the orbit of Mars. When Brahe died the following year, Kepler
took over his job and inherited Brahe's extensive collection of
astronomy data, which had been painstakingly observed by the
naked eye. Over the next decade, Kepler learned about the work of
Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who
had invented a telescope with which he discovered lunar mountains
and craters, the largest four satellites of Jupiter and the
phases of Venus, among other things. Kepler corresponded with
Galileo and eventually obtained a telescope of his own and
improved upon the design. In 1609, Kepler published the first two
of his three laws of planetary motion, which held that planets
move around the sun in ellipses, not circles (as had been widely
believed up to that time), and that planets speed up as they
approach the sun and slow down as they move away. In 1619, he
produced his third law, which used mathematic principles to
relate the time a planet takes to orbit the sun to the average
distance of the planet from the sun.
Kepler's research was slow to gain widespread traction during his
lifetime, but it later served as a key influence on the English
mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and his law of
gravitational force. Additionally, Kepler did important work in
the fields of optics, including demonstrating how the human eye
works, and math. He died on November 15, 1630, in Regensberg,
Germany. As for Kepler's calculation about the universe's
birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang
theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7
billion years.
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@gmail.com
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