Facts of 'Johannes Kepler'

'Johannes Kepler'(1571-1630)

        He said he would solve it in 8 days but it took 8 years.....!

               Johannes Kepler helped lead a scientific revolution in the 17th century with his amazing work in the field of astronomy. Among his many contributions were the three laws of planetary motion.

1. The young Johannes Kepler was prone to ill-health. His hands were crippled and his eyesight permanently impaired by smallpox. 

2. Kepler was interested in astronomy from an early age, this interest was further piqued when he witnessed both a comet in 1577 as well as a lunar eclipse in 1580. 

3. When Kepler was three years old, his father joined a group of mercenary soldiers to fight the Protestant uprising in Holland, thereby disgracing his family. Soon after his return in 1576, he again joined the Belgian military service for a few years; and in 1588 he abandoned his family forever. Kepler’s mother used to collect herbs and natural medicines. She was considered to be a witch. At one point Kepler had to hire lawyers to defend his mother from being sentenced to death. His grandmother was tried in the Salem Witch Trials and sentenced to death. 

4. Kepler’s work on planetary motion helped Isaac Newton later devise his own theory of universal gravitation. He developed the Rudolphine Tables which contained calculations using logarithms. Using these perpetual tables, Kepler calculated the planetary positions and predicted the transit of Venus and Mercury across the face of the sun. The three laws of planetary motion devised by Kepler are:

• The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus.
• A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
• The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

5. Famous Johannes Kepler quotes include: “Nature uses as little as possible of anything ;

“I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.”

6. A wealthy Danish nobleman, Brahe built an observatory in Prague where he tracked the motions of the planets and maintained the most accurate observations of the solar system at the time. In 1600, Brahe invited Kepler to come work with him. He assigned Kepler to solve the mystery of Mars, one of the most puzzling problems in astronomy at the time.Kepler received a letter from Galileo thanking him for believing in his planetary discoveries.

7. The Martian problem, which Kepler said he would solve in eight days, took nearly eight years. Astronomers had long struggled to figure out why Mars appeared to walk backwards across the night sky. No model of the solar system — not even Copernicus' — could account for the retrograde motion.

8. Meanwhile, another discovery molded Kepler’s life: the eldest daughter of a wealthy mill owner, Barbara Müller, had “set his heart on fire .” Two years younger than Kepler, she had been widowed twice. Early in 1596 Kepler sought her hand, but his seven-mouth absence on a trip to Tübingen almost scuttled the courtship. The wedding took place 27 April 1597, under ominous constellations, as Kepler noted in his diary

9. Though Kepler is best known for his defining laws regarding planetary motion, he made several other notable contributions to science. He was the first to determine that refraction drives vision in the eye, and that using two eyes enables depth perception. He created eyeglasses for both near and farsightedness, and explained how a telescope worked. He described images and magnification, and understood the properties of reflection.

10. Though Kepler is best known for his defining laws regarding planetary motion, he made several other notable contributions to science. He was the first to determine that refraction drives vision in the eye, and that using two eyes enables depth perception. He created eyeglasses for both near and farsightedness, and explained how a telescope worked. He described images and magnification, and understood the properties of reflection.

11. Johannes Kepler died after falling ill at the age of 58, on November 15, 1630 in the German city of Regensburg. Today Kepler’s grave is lost. The graveyard he was buried in was destroyed during religious battles a few years after he was buried.

 

12. Kepler wrote a book called The Dream (1634), published after his death, that was considered an early work of science fiction. The book was an imaginative story of a voyage to the moon.

13. In recognition of his contribution to his our understanding of the motion of the planets, NASA named their planet-finding telescope after the German astronomer.