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  3. Much has been made of the 400th anniversary this year of Galileo pointing a telescope at the moon and jotting down what he saw.

Much has been made of the 400th anniversary this year of Galileo pointing a telescope at the moon and jotting down what he saw.

admin2015-12-28  16
问题     Much has been made of the 400th anniversary this year of Galileo pointing a telescope at the moon and jotting down what he saw. But 2009 is also the 400th anniversary of the publication by Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and astronomer, of "Astronomia Nova".【F1】This was a book that contained an account of his discovery of how the planets move around the sun, correcting Copernicus’s own more famous but incorrectly formulated description of the solar system. And it established the laws for planetary motion on which Isaac Newton based his work.
    Four centuries ago the received wisdom was that of Aristotle, who asserted that the Earth was the centre of the universe, and that it was encircled by the spheres of the moon, the sun, the planets and the stars beyond them. Copernicus had noticed inconsistencies in this theory and had placed the sun at the centre, with the Earth and the other planets travelling around the sun.
    【F2】Some six decades later when Kepler tackled the motion of Mars, he proposed a number of geometric models, checking his results against the position of the planet as recorded by his boss. Kepler repeatedly found that his model failed to predict the correct position of the planet. He altered it and, in so doing, created first egg-shaped "orbits" and, finally, an ellipse(椭圆)with the sun placed at one focus.【F3】Kepler went on to show that an elliptical orbit is sufficient to explain the movement of the other planets and to devise the laws of planetary motion that Newton built on.
    A.E.L. Davis this week told astronomers and historians that it was the rotation of the sun that provided Kepler with what he thought was one of the causes of the planetary motion that his laws described, although his reasoning would today be considered entirely wrong.
    【F4】In 1609 astronomy and astrology were seen as intimately related; mathematics and natural philosophy, meanwhile, were quite separate areas of endeavor, however, Kepler sought physical mechanisms to explain his mathematical result. He wanted to know how it could be that the planets orbited the sun.【F5】Once he learned that the sun rotated, he comforted himself with the thought that the sun’s rays must somehow sweep the planets around it while some magnetism accounted for the exact elliptical path. As today’s astronomers struggle to determine whether they can learn from the past, Kepler’s tale provides a salutary reminder that only some explanations stand the test of time.
【F3】
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答案接着，开普勒又证明椭圆轨道模型同样适用于解释其他行星的运行轨迹，并且依此模型足以归纳出行星运行定律．而这些定律日后成为了牛顿的理论基础。
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