Kepler was born in southwest
Germany in 1571. He spent several years of his young life living with his
grandparents, and as an adult reflected upon the character of his parents very
unfavorably. He wrote of his father, “He destroyed everything. He was a
wrongdoer, abrupt and quarrelsome.” He received his education at a Protestant
seminary where he primarily studied theology. He taught as a professor of
mathematics. Kepler was the first to publicly defend the Copernican system, and
received criticism from Martin Luther as well as the Catholic Church. After the publication of his first book, The Cosmographic Mystery, he was invited
by Tycho Brahe to move to Prague and begin calculating the distances of orbits.
When Brahe passed away in 1601, Kepler replaced him as the Imperial Mathematician,
the most prestigious mathematician appointment in Europe and gained access to
his observations before Brahe’s family could claim them and use them for
financial gain. His first assignment under Brahe had been to explain the
retrograde motion of Mars, which he eventually attributed to elliptical orbits,
countering Copernicus’s idea that the orbits were perfectly circular. Kepler
also observed the planets had changing velocities, and appeared to move faster
when closer to the sun. This became his second law of planetary motion, and
stated that planets sweep out equal amount of area over the same amount of time.
His third law explained the relationship between how long it takes planets to
orbit the sun and how far away they are from the sun. In 1615 there was a
witch-hunt in Kepler’s hometown, and his own mother was accused of witchcraft.
Her charges were not dismissed until five years later, and Kepler himself was
in charge of her defense. Kepler is most known for his laws of planetary
motion, but he made many other notable discoveries as well. He was the first to
discover that refraction is responsible for vision in our eyes, and that using
two eyes enables depth perception. He created eyeglasses that corrected both
nearsighted and farsighted vision. He also explained how a telescope worked,
describing images, magnification and the properties of reflection. Kepler also
claimed that gravity was caused by two bodies, and that the moon was the cause
of the tides on Earth. Kepler, earlier in his life, calculated the birth year
of Christ.
Sources
Cited
Voelkel, James R. Johannes Kepler and the New Astronomy.
New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
"Johannes Kepler Biography." Space.com.
N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.
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