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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Kepler Johann. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
Shortly after death Copernicus on the basis of his system of the world, astronomers compiled tables of planetary movements. These tables were in better agreement with the observations than the previous tables compiled according to Ptolemy. But after some time, astronomers discovered a discrepancy between these tables and observational data on the movement of celestial bodies. For advanced scientists, it was clear that the teachings of Copernicus were correct, but it was necessary to investigate more deeply and find out the laws of planetary motion. This problem was solved by the great German scientist Kepler. Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571 in the small town of Weil der Stadt near Stuttgart. Kepler was born into a poor family, and therefore, with great difficulty, he managed to finish school and enter the University of Tübingen in 1589. Here he enthusiastically studied mathematics and astronomy. His teacher Professor Mestlin was secretly a follower of Copernicus. Of course, at the university, Mestlin taught astronomy according to Ptolemy, but at home he introduced his student to the basics of the new teaching. And soon Kepler became an ardent and staunch supporter of the Copernican theory. Unlike Maestlin, Kepler did not hide his views and beliefs. The open propaganda of the teachings of Copernicus very soon brought on him the hatred of local theologians. Even before graduating from university, in 1594, Johann was sent to teach mathematics at a Protestant school in the city of Graz, the capital of the Austrian province of Styria. Already in 1596, he published The Cosmographic Secret, where, accepting Copernicus's conclusion about the central position of the Sun in the planetary system, he tries to find a connection between the distances of the planetary orbits and the radii of the spheres, in which regular polyhedra are inscribed in a certain order and around which are described. Despite the fact that this work of Kepler was still a model of scholastic, quasi-scientific sophistication, it brought fame to the author. The famous Danish astronomer-observer Tycho Brahe, who was skeptical about the scheme itself, paid tribute to the independence of the young scientist's thinking, his knowledge of astronomy, skill and perseverance in calculations, and expressed a desire to meet him. The meeting that took place later was of exceptional importance for the further development of astronomy. In 1600, Brahe, who arrived in Prague, offered Johann a job as his assistant for sky observations and astronomical calculations. Shortly before this, Brahe was forced to leave his homeland of Denmark and the observatory he built there, where he conducted astronomical observations for a quarter of a century. This observatory was equipped with the best measuring instruments, and Brahe himself was a most skilful observer. When the Danish king deprived Brahe of funds for the maintenance of the observatory, he left for Prague. Brahe was very interested in the teachings of Copernicus, but he was not a supporter. He put forward his explanation of the structure of the world; he recognized the planets as satellites of the Sun, and considered the Sun, Moon and stars to be bodies revolving around the Earth, behind which, thus, the position of the center of the entire Universe was preserved. Brahe did not work with Kepler for long: he died in 1601. After his death, Kepler began to study the remaining materials with data from long-term astronomical observations. Working on them, especially on materials on the motion of Mars, Kepler made a remarkable discovery: he derived the laws of planetary motion, which became the basis of theoretical astronomy. The philosophers of ancient Greece thought that the circle was the most perfect geometric shape. And if so, then the planets should also make their revolutions only in regular circles (circles). Kepler came to the conclusion that the opinion that had been established since antiquity about the circular shape of planetary orbits was wrong. By calculations, he proved that the planets do not move in circles, but in ellipses - closed curves, the shape of which is somewhat different from a circle. In solving this problem, Kepler had to meet a case that, generally speaking, could not be solved by the methods of mathematics of constants. The matter was reduced to calculating the area of the sector of the eccentric circle. If this problem is translated into modern mathematical language, we arrive at an elliptic integral. Naturally, Kepler could not give a solution to the problem in quadratures, but he did not retreat before the difficulties that arose and solved the problem by summing an infinitely large number of "actualized" infinitesimals. This approach to solving an important and complex practical problem represented in modern times the first step in the prehistory of mathematical analysis. Kepler's first law suggests that the sun is not at the center of the ellipse, but at a special point called the focus. From this it follows that the distance of the planet from the Sun is not always the same. Kepler found that the speed at which a planet moves around the Sun is also not always the same: approaching closer to the Sun, the planet moves faster, and moving further away from it, slower. This feature in the motion of the planets constitutes Kepler's second law. At the same time, Kepler develops a fundamentally new mathematical apparatus, making an important step in the development of the mathematics of variables. Both Kepler's laws have become the property of science since 1609, when his famous "New Astronomy" was published - a presentation of the foundations of new celestial mechanics. However, the release of this remarkable work did not immediately attract due attention: even the great Galileo, apparently, did not accept Kepler's laws until the end of his days. The needs of astronomy stimulated the further development of the computational tools of mathematics and their popularization. In 1615, Kepler published a relatively small, but very capacious book - "The New Stereometry of Wine Barrels", in which he continued to develop his integration methods and applied them to find the volumes of more than 90 solids of revolution, sometimes quite complex. In the same place, he also considered extremal problems, which led to another branch of the mathematics of infinitesimals - differential calculus. The need to improve the means of astronomical calculations, the compilation of tables of planetary movements based on the Copernican system attracted Kepler to questions of the theory and practice of logarithms. Inspired by the work of Napier, Kepler independently built the theory of logarithms on a purely arithmetic basis and with its help compiled logarithmic tables close to Neper's, but more accurate, first published in 1624 and republished until 1700. Kepler was the first to use logarithmic calculations in astronomy. He was able to complete the "Rudolphin Tables" of planetary movements only thanks to a new means of calculation. The interest shown by the scientist in second-order curves and in the problems of astronomical optics led him to develop a general principle of continuity - a kind of heuristic technique that allows you to find the properties of one object from the properties of another, if the first is obtained by passing to the limit from the second. In the book "Additions to Vitellius, or the Optical Part of Astronomy" (1604), Kepler, studying conic sections, interprets the parabola as a hyperbola or an ellipse with an infinitely distant focus - this is the first case in the history of mathematics of applying the general principle of continuity. With the introduction of the concept of a point at infinity, Kepler took an important step towards the creation of another branch of mathematics - projective geometry. Kepler's whole life was devoted to an open struggle for the teachings of Copernicus. In 1617-1621, at the height of the Thirty Years' War, when the book of Copernicus was already on the Vatican's "List of Forbidden Books", and the scientist himself was going through a particularly difficult period in his life, he publishes "Essays on Copernican Astronomy" in three issues totaling about 1000 pages. The title of the book inaccurately reflects its content - the Sun there occupies the place indicated by Copernicus, and the planets, the Moon and the satellites of Jupiter discovered shortly before by Galileo circulate according to the laws discovered by Kepler. It was in fact the first textbook of the new astronomy, and it was published during a particularly fierce struggle of the church with the revolutionary doctrine, when Kepler's teacher Mestlin, a Copernican by conviction, published a textbook on Ptolemy's astronomy! In the same years, Kepler also published "The Harmony of the World", where he formulates the third law of planetary motions. The scientist established a strict relationship between the time of revolution of the planets and their distance from the Sun. It turned out that the squares of the periods of revolution of any two planets are related to each other as the cubes of their average distances from the Sun. This is Kepler's third law. For many years he has been working on compiling new planetary tables, printed in 1627 under the title "Rudolphin Tables", which for many years were the reference book of astronomers. Kepler also has important results in other sciences, in particular in optics. The optical scheme of the refractor developed by him already by 1640 became the main one in astronomical observations. Kepler's work on the creation of celestial mechanics played an important role in the approval and development of the teachings of Copernicus. He prepared the ground for further research, in particular for Newton's discovery of the law of universal gravitation. Kepler's laws still retain their significance: having learned to take into account the interaction of celestial bodies, scientists use them not only to calculate the movements of natural celestial bodies, but, most importantly, also artificial ones, such as spaceships, witnesses of the emergence and improvement of which our generation is. The discovery of the laws of planetary circulation required many years of hard and hard work from the scientist. Kepler, who endured persecution both from the Catholic rulers whom he served, and from fellow-believers-Lutherans, not all of whose dogmas he could accept, has to move a lot. Prague, Linz, Ulm, Sagan - an incomplete list of cities in which he worked. Kepler was engaged not only in the study of the circulation of the planets, he was also interested in other issues of astronomy. Comets especially attracted his attention. Noticing that the tails of comets always point away from the Sun, Kepler conjectured that the tails are formed under the action of the sun's rays. At that time, nothing was yet known about the nature of solar radiation and the structure of comets. It was only in the second half of the XNUMXth century and in the XNUMXth century that it was established that the formation of comet tails is really connected with the radiation of the Sun. The scientist died during a trip to Regensburg on November 15, 1630, when he tried in vain to get at least part of the salary that the imperial treasury owed him for many years. He has a great merit in the development of our knowledge of the solar system. Scientists of subsequent generations, who appreciated the significance of Kepler's works, called him the "legislator of the sky", since it was he who found out the laws by which the movement of celestial bodies in the solar system takes place. Author: Samin D.K.
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