Johannes Kepler was born on December 27th, 1571 and died on November 15th, 1630. Kepler was important to astronomy primarily because of his development of the laws of planetary motion. In short, these laws state that all planets’ orbits are ellipses, show that a planet’s orbital speed is inversely proportional to its distance from the body it orbits, and give an equation relating a planet’s orbital period to the planet’s orbiting distance. These laws have allowed us to better understand how our solar system works as well as how objects, in general, orbit a center of mass.
Around this time, Shakespeare published Romeo and Juliet (1597), perhaps his most famous play, and the British established their first permanent colony in the America’s, Jamestown (1607). Furthermore, Ivan the Terrible was born in 1530 and died in 1584. He was the first tsar of Russian and is most famous for his conquest of vast amounts of present day Russian territory.
In present times, it is easy to scoff at the discoveries that astronomers made hundreds of years ago and refer to them as fairly obvious. When we think about what was occurring during the time of the discoveries, though, it becomes more clear that these discoveries were actually pretty remarkable. As mentioned, around the time Kepler came up with his laws of planetary motion, Jamestown was founded, Shakespeare first published Romeo and Juliet, and Ivan the terrible ruled Russia. Comparing the founding of Jamestown, in particular, to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion is quite fascinating. One of the primary goals of the Jamestown colony was to find a short water route to the Pacific. This shows how little people’s understanding of Earth’s geography was. Thus, the fact that Kepler was able to observe planets millions of miles away and come up with accurate calculations regarding the orbits of these planets is astonishing given the technology and knowledge of his time. This causes us to think about what people in the future might think of the discoveries we are currently making. Though we consider people making these discoveries to be geniuses, will people in the future scoff at the discoveries we are currently making?
