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Updated: May 29, 2025
These laws are not fortuitous, or the result of the blind grouping of irrational forces. It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler calls him, who looked upon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him this world is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive." But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of a disordered mind.
Following this suggestion, the German astronomer Olbers, of Bremen, had formed an association of twenty-four observers in different parts of Europe, who should divide among themselves the zodiacal band, and begin a system of independent scrutiny, either to verify or disprove Kepler's hypothesis. There was another reason also of no small influence tending to the same end.
Thus, though Kepler's consequent inference that, because the orbit of a planet is an ellipse, the planet would continue to revolve in that same ellipse, was an induction, his previous application of the conception of an ellipse, abstracted from other phenomena, to sum up his direct observations of the successive positions occupied by the different planets, and thus to describe their orbits, was no induction.
The riddle of the universe, like less important riddles, is unravelled only by approximative trials, and the most brilliant discoverers have usually been the bravest guessers. Kepler's laws were the result of indefatigable guessing, and so, in a somewhat different sense, was the wave-theory of light. But the guesswork of scientific inquirers is very different now from what it was in older times.
Let us make the most of it. There are fifty-two Sundays in the year, making a total that is almost equivalent to the long vacation. It so happens that I have a glorious question to wrestle with today; that of Kepler's three laws, which, when explored by the calculus, are to show me the fundamental mechanism of the heavenly bodies.
This was a ring mountain, about 33 miles in diameter, having, like Copernicus, a crater of immense profundity containing central cones. Whilst they were directing their glasses towards its gloomy depths, Barbican mentioned to his friends Kepler's strange idea regarding the formation of these ring mountains. "They must have been constructed," he said, "by mortal hands."
But the sun is overwhelming, under the meager cover of the bushes. Cheerily, my lad! Have at your Kepler's laws in the company of the blue-winged locusts. You will return home with your problems solved, but with a blistered skin. An overdose of sun in the neck shall be the outcome of grasping the law of the areas. One thing makes up for another.
There is, on the one hand, the form in which Kepler pronounced his discovery; there is, on the other, the context in which he made this pronouncement. We have already pointed out that the third law forms part of Kepler's comprehensive work, Harmonices Mundi. To the modern critic's understanding it appears there like an erratic block. For Kepler this was different.
The following is Kepler's summary of her character: "Her name is Susannah, the daughter of John Reuthinger and Barbara, citizens of the town of Eferdingen. The father was by trade a cabinetmaker, but both her parents are dead. She has received an education well worth the largest dowry, by favour of the Lady of Stahrenberg, the strictness of whose household is famous throughout the province.
Her speed, of course, we know by Kepler's laws, would vary according to her distance from the sun, and if she were as I conjecture from the temperature at that date on the 15th of January at her perihelion, she would be traveling twice as fast as the earth, which moves at the rate of between 50,000 and 60,000 miles an hour."
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