Johannes Kepler's Impact On Science

Johannes Kepler: Life, Laws, & Impact on Science

Johannes Kepler was born the 27th of December 1571 and passed away the 15th of November 1630. He was born in Weil der Stadt in Swabia, a small town in Germany, and later moved with his family to Leonberg, which was a town nearby his birth town. Growing up, Kepler was said to be a very sickly child. He had gotten smallpox as a child, which crippled him with poor vision, and crippled hands for the rest of his life. He was a son to Heinrich Kepler, a mercenary soldier, and Katharina Guldenmann, a herbalist, and healer. His mother,being a specialist in the herbs, had decided to specialize in a new form of healing. This finding led to the suspicion of probable witchcraft. She was trailed against
In class, we have covered forces, the most important being gravity. Gravity is basically a force that attracts two bodies with a mass together. The connection I was able to make it that gravity is what attracts the planets to the sun. in Kepler's model, the planets orbit around the sun;however, never crash into it because of the normal force. As we learned in class, forces come in pairs, therefore, there has to be a force that goes along with the gravity that attracts the planets to the sun. In class, we also learned about motion. Newton’s three laws of motion apply to planetary motion because Newton's first law states that an object in constant motion will stay in motion unless a force acts upon it. Planets are currently orbiting around the sun at a constant motion;however, for instance, if a large asteroid the size of the moon were to collide with the earth, the force applied can throw the earth off its constant orbital path. Another connection I was able to make is based on the conservation of energy. Energy is the ability to do work. Therefore, orbiting planets conserve energy when they rotate due to the gravity pulling them towards the sun. Also, a satellite (the moon) does work due to the force that attracts it to the earth and causes it to rotate around the earth. In addition, I was able to make a connection with a term we learned called the central force. The central force is a force that points away from a fixed point where the magnitude of the force depends on the distance of the object to the fixed point. In the case of planetary motion, the central force can be found on the planet and the sun. The planet being the object, and the sun being the fixed