Chance and then Copernicanism changed the course of Johannes Kepler. Instead of continuing his father’s work in wine, he became one of the most important symbols of astronomy and planets in history.
The beginning of Johannes Kepler and an accident that changed his career
Johannes Kepler was born in Fabel, Württemberg, southern Germany, on December 27, 1571, to a poor father who owned a tavern. A Protestant priest, and this was the best decision he had made from the angle of astronomy, and then Kepler went to the famous Theological University of Tübingen where he studied theology.
There, an incident occurred that was destined to determine his future, when he met a professor who explained to him the Copernican system derived from Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish scientist who in 1543 published his theory of the solar system and refuted Claudius Ptolemy’s theory in 154 AD, which had placed the Earth as an immobile planet in the middle of the universe. The sun and other planets revolve around it, but Copernicus confirmed in a scientific way that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system, and that the earth is a planet like the rest of the planets that all revolve around the sun.
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Kepler immediately realized the validity of this theory and became a believer in the theories of Copernicanism, and soon his name became famous, and his fame reached such a large extent that the great astronomer Tycho Braha invited him in 1599 to come to Prague to work as his assistant.
In the year 1600, Kepler landed in Prague, and a few months later the scientist Tycho Brahe died, and Kepler succeeded him as an astronomer at the court of Emperor Rudolf II. .
The Three Laws of Planetary Motion
Kepler proved that Copernicus’ heliocentric system is the only one that accurately reflects the truth.
- The planets revolve around the sun in a motion that is not circular, but in an ellipse where the sun occupies one of its foci, and the ellipse is the shape we get if we cut a cylindrical body with an inclined saw.
- The speed of a planet varies in its revolving around the sun according to its distance from it.
- The square of a planet’s orbital period is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
The end of Johann Kepler
On the night of November 15, 1630 AD, in a small room in a merchant’s house in the city of Regensburg, southern Germany, a man of short build and not advanced age died. The death of Kepler, one of the greatest astronomers in history, who laid down the three basic laws of planetary motion.
Waseem Afifi
