Scribd
Upload
5 views

jose 1a

The document discusses the evolution of astronomical models from Ptolemy's geocentric system, which was widely accepted despite its flaws, to Copernicus's heliocentric model proposing that the sun is at the center of the universe. It highlights the contributions of Galileo and Kepler, who provided observational evidence and refined the model with elliptical orbits, respectively. Finally, it introduces Newton's law of universal gravitation, which explained the motion of celestial bodies and suggested a universe without natural boundaries.

Uploaded by

xerod50207
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
5 views

jose 1a

The document discusses the evolution of astronomical models from Ptolemy's geocentric system, which was widely accepted despite its flaws, to Copernicus's heliocentric model proposing that the sun is at the center of the universe. It highlights the contributions of Galileo and Kepler, who provided observational evidence and refined the model with elliptical orbits, respectively. Finally, it introduces Newton's law of universal gravitation, which explained the motion of celestial bodies and suggested a universe without natural boundaries.

Uploaded by

xerod50207
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

The planets themselves moved on smaller circles attached to their respective spheres in order to account

for their rather complicated observed paths in the sky. The outermost sphere carried the so-called fixed
stars, which always stay in the same positions relative to each other but which rotate together across the
sky. What lay beyond the last sphere was never made very clear, but it certainly was not part of
mankind’s observable universe. Ptolemy’s model provided a reasonably accurate system for predicting
the positions of heavenly bodies in the sky. But in order to predict these positions correctly, Ptolemy had
to make an assumption that the moon followed a path that sometimes brought it twice as close to the
earth as at other times. And that meant that the moon ought sometimes to appear twice as big as at
other times! Ptolemy recognized this flaw, but nevertheless his model was generally, although not
universally, accepted. It was adopted by the Christian church as the picture of the universe that was in
accordance with Scripture, for it had the great advantage that it left lots of room outside the sphere of
fixed stars for heaven and hell. A simpler model, however, was proposed in 1514 by a Polish priest,
Nicholas Copernicus. (At first, perhaps for fear of being branded a heretic by his church, Copernicus
circulated his model anonymously.) His idea was that the sun was stationary at the center and that the
earth and the planets moved in circular orbits around the sun. Nearly a century passed before this idea
was taken seriously. Then two astronomers – the German, Johannes A Brief History of Time - Stephen
Hawking... Chapter 1 file:///C|/WINDOWS/Desktop/blahh/Stephen Hawking - A brief history of
time/n.html (2 of 7) [2/20/2001 3:14:06 AM] A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking... Chapter 1
Kepler, and the Italian, Galileo Galilei – started publicly to support the Copernican theory, despite the
fact that the orbits it predicted did not quite match the ones observed. The death blow to the
Aristotelian/Ptolemaic theory came in 1609. In that year, Galileo started observing the night sky with a
telescope, which had just been invented. When he looked at the planet Jupiter, Galileo found that it was
accompanied by several small satellites or moons that orbited around it. This implied that everything did
not have to orbit directly around the earth, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had thought. (It was, of course, still
possible to believe that the earth was stationary at the center of the universe and that the moons of
Jupiter moved on extremely complicated paths around the earth, giving the appearance that they
orbited Jupiter. However, Copernicus’s theory was much simpler.) At the same time, Johannes Kepler had
modified Copernicus’s theory, suggesting that the planets moved not in circles but in ellipses (an ellipse
is an elongated circle). The predictions now finally matched the observations. As far as Kepler was
concerned, elliptical orbits were merely an ad hoc hypothesis, and a rather repugnant one at that,
because ellipses were clearly less perfect than circles. Having discovered almost by accident that
elliptical orbits fit the observations well, he could not reconcile them with his idea that the planets were
made to orbit the sun by magnetic forces. An explanation was provided only much later, in 1687, when
Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, probably the most
important single work ever published in the physical sciences. In it Newton not only put forward a theory
of how bodies move in space and time, but he also developed the complicated mathematics needed to
analyze those motions. In addition, Newton postulated a law of universal gravitation according to which
each body in the universe was attracted toward every other body by a force that was stronger the more
massive the bodies and the closer they were to each other. It was this same force that caused objects to
fall to the ground. (The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly
apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat “in a
contemplative mood” and “was occasioned by the fall of an apple.”) Newton went on to show that,
according to his law, gravity causes the moon to move in an elliptical orbit around the earth and causes
the earth and the planets to follow elliptical paths around the sun. The Copernican model got rid of
Ptolemy’s celestial spheres, and with them, the idea that the universe had a natural boundary. Since
“fixed stars” did not appear to change their positions apart from a rotation across the sky caused by the
earth spinning on its axis, it became natural to suppose that the fixed stars were objects like our sun but
very much farther away. Newton realized that, according to his theory of gravity, the stars should attract
each other, so it seemed they could not remain essentially motionless. Would they not all fall together at
some point? In a letter in 1691 to Richard Bentley, another leading thinker of his day, Newton argued
that this would indeed happen if there were only a finite number of stars distributed over a finite region
of space. But he reasoned that if, on the other hand, there were an infinite number of stars, distributed
more or less uniformly over infinite space, this would not happen, because there would not be any
central point for them to fall to

You might also like