Johannes Kepler's Role In The 17th Century Scientific Revolution

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Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer and mathematician, and played an important role in the 17th century Scientific Revolution. He was a pioneer in the field of astronomy, he founded the theory of celestial mechanics and was the first astronomer to explain planetary motion. He was a very talented child and his talents led him to become a mathematics teacher in Austria. Kepler also contributed in theories of geometry and optics. His main body of work was in astronomy and planetary motion, he explained how the tides were influenced by the moon. He founded the 3 laws of planetary motion. Kepler was a deeply religious man and credited god with his life and career as well as for the discoveries that he had made. Kepler was of the Lutheran faith and faced prosecution by the catholic church. He completed the Rudolphine Tables, a series of star catalogs and books of planetary tables in 1627. …show more content…
He needed to find the best explanations for the motions of Mars. There were many theories of how the planets orbited, mostly in a circular motion, but the data didn’t support them. Instead, Kepler found that another shape, the ellipse, worked a lot better. In his book, Kepler states that Mars travels in an elliptical orbit around the sun. He, later, explained the same with other planets, demonstrating that this shape fit the available observations. The further apart both foci are, the longer and skinnier the ellipse. The skinniness parameter is called eccentricity. In our solar system, the orbit of the planets are not very eccentric at all and very close to circular. With his first law of planetary motion, Kepler rejected these circular orbits, and explained the rotational motion of Mars as an
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