Johannes Kepler’s contributions to renessance science
In: Physics
Science at the time of Kepler was just starting to resemble Science as we know it today, in the sense of being based on reproduceable evidence and written in the language of mathematics. Science of this era was better called “Natural Philosophy” and was closer to clever verbal debates that modern “proofs”.
There was a man at this time named Tycho Brahe, a truly wacky aristocrat worth his own ELI5. Brahe spent a ton of money building an incredible observatory and hiring astronomers to take intricate nightly measurements over the motion of the stars and planets. Kepler established himself as a brilliant mathematician and when he looked at the universe he saw math, he saw Creation as being based on Geometry, trigonometry, etc. He made some enemies with the Church for this view but nevertheless, he persisted.
Eventually Kepler came into possession of Brahe’s decades worth of measurements, and using this raw data, for the first time, applied the laws of mathematics to *explain and predict* the nature of the Universe.
He wasn’t always right, but he was clearly onto something, and served as a direct influence on Isaac Newton, arguably the single most significant human being to ever live. Isaac Newton took Kepler’s equations, theories, and methodologies and created modern Science as we know it.
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