Kepler

A man is a marvel of nature.god has given man the ability to find and search for the purpose of his life,the universe and everything around him.he has given man intelligence and logic,the power of reasoning and doubt.history is full of such men and women who lost themselves to the power and beauty of the essence of the cosmos and made it their passion to inhale the cosmic power around them.one such man was Johannes kepler.born in 1571 in germany..as a boy he was sent to study for the clergy to a protestant boarding school.but he was stubborn and extremely independent and became isolated and withdrawn living there. As he grew up he believed that the creative power of the cosmos was his god.he closely studied euclids geometry and said-“geometry has existed before creation..therefore it must be god himself”…he often thought why should I not be allowed to study the universe if according to Christianity god has made it..y am I being stopped? Being a brilliant thinker he became a teacher and taught maths in a school in Austria ..but often would stop in mid sentence and think about the planets.at that time there were only 6 known planets-mercury,venus,earth,mars,Jupiter and Saturn. Kepler thought why only 6? Can there be 20 planets? Why not? He did not believe that the cosmos was not abundant to restrict its making to just 6 planets.there had to be more.he also disagreed on the view of perfection that the church often preached-the perfect wotld,the perfect thought …he said –“I do not believe that man is perfect or that the earth is perfect either.so why should its orbit be so ?” Ptolemy,Pythagoras and other Christian astronomers before kepler believed that the earth is a perfect circle and hence follows a circular path around the sun.kepler was not too sure that was true.he discovered that nars moves about the sun in an ellipse.if that is so isn’t it possible for earth and the other planets to do so likewise? Kepler was a daring man.to go against the church was blasphemy,nonetheless kepler did not want to believe something his soul did not reckon with or that nature did not show.he formulated 3 important laws on the basis of which we send satellites into space and are able to study the motion of other planets. The first law-a planet moves in an ellipse with the sun at one focus. The second law-in a uniform circular motion an equal angle of a circle is covered in equal times.but in an ellipse as a planet moves along its orbit it sweeps out a little wedge shaped area within the ellipse.when it is close to the sun,in a fixed period of time it traces out a large arc in its orbit but the area represented by that arc is not very large because the planet is close to the sun.when the planet is far aay it covers a much smaller area I nthe same time period but that arc is equal to the bigger area coz the sun is more distant.kepler found that these 2 areas are the same no matter how elliptical the orbit. So the second law hence goes-in equal time the planets sweep out equal areas. The third law-the squares of the periods of the planets to complete one orbit is equal to the cubes of their average distance from the sun. p-period of one orbit a-average distance p2=a3 lets take an example of the planet Jupiter here1 au=150 million km.. We know Ju

piter is 5 au from the sun..so –a3=5x5x5=125 So if p2=a3 then the square root of 125=11 to be close..and 11 years is what Jupiter takes to finish one revolution. Exactly 8 days after keplers discovery of his 3rd law a was leashed out in Prague where he was.he was taken refuge.his wife and kid died in an epidemic and his mother kathrina kepler was charged as being a witch and taken away. This took a toll on his mind.he started talking to himself and would act weird.he started to believe that the depressions on the moon were due to beings living there.he argued that the circular shape of the craters implied a degree of order that only intelligent life could explain.sadly he did not realize that the great rocks falling from the sky could produce a local explosion that could carve out a circular cavity.he also beleievd that gratll of china and the pyramids were built by alien beings.the idea that geometrical order reveals an underlying intelligence was central to keplers life.what he failed to understand was that intelligence was embedded In the core of that order itself. So the observational search for E.T began in the same generation as the invention of the telescope! Kepler believed that a day would come when celestial ships with sails would navigate the sky.that is what we are doing today –using his laws. The lifelong quest of Johannes kepler a man just like you and me to understand planetary motion culminated 36 years after his death in the work of issac Newton. The late astronomer carl sagan once said that astronomy is a humbling experience.we live on a pale blue dot and our humlility lies in giving grace to such men who thought different,who sought after the truth,who searched their souls to find the true meaning of our selfish life on a planet we call earth.