In high school, physics and mathematics were speaking clearly to me in a language that helped explain a piece of the world I struggled to understand; I had many unanswered questions. Later at many academic institutions, the choices I made continued to satisfy my ongoing curiosity. Over the course of my training, Johannes Kepler is one of many names whose scientific work made “sense” and provided some “ordered logic” to my (naive and incomplete) perception of “illogic” and “nonsense.”
What I didn’t know is that decades later, I’m interested in discovering and finding the physical traces for those names. I still have questions, but they no longer involve difficult calculations. Instead, it’s about the “math” of how individuals reach their destinations.
I’m on a train heading out from Stuttgart, not to the famous car museums, but to a town where Johannes Kepler was born. There’s no doubt in my mind this has become a kind of pilgrimage.
With S-Bahn Stuttgart S6 train service, Weil der Stadt is a 40-minute trip from Stuttgart.
Kepler-Denkmal (1870) am Marktplatz / Kepler memorial (1870) at the town’s market square.
Inauguration of the Kepler memorial on 24 June 1870. Stadtmuseum (town museum) collection.
In Weil der Stadt, the Kepler-Museum is inside the house where Johannes Kepler was born in 1571. In 1576, the Kepler family moved out from Weil der Stadt and to the nearby town of Leonberg. The museum not only summarizes Kepler’s timeline but also highlights a number of key influences on Kepler, as well as his scientific contributions.
Copernicus view: the heliocentric model of the solar system; idea also attributed to Greek astronomer Aristarch of Samos from 3rd-century BCE.
Aware of Copernicus’ work, Kepler’s own thoughts and ideas were greatly influenced by the Copernicus model of a Sun-centric solar system.
Undoubtedly thanks to the long arduous work by Tycho Brahe, Kepler’s 1627 orbit-data tables for the planets were the most accurate of its time.
With the introduction of the “logarithm” as a mathematical tool by John Napier in 1617, Kepler realized his own calculations became simpler (because, power laws!) and published supplementary data using logarithms.
Celestial mechanics, Kepler’s 1st Law. “Each planet’s orbit is in the shape of an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.”
Celestial mechanics, Kepler’s 2nd Law. “An object in an elliptical orbit around the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time.”Celestial mechanics, Kepler’s 3rd Law. “For an object in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, the time to complete one full orbit is U (T) and the ellipse’s semi-major axis (or average distance) is A. The relationship between U and A is that the square of the period (U^2) is directly proportional to the cube of the average distance (A^3).”
“Keplerstadt: Weil der Stadt.” Inside Weil der Stadt Bahnhof.
I made all photos above with an iPhone15 on 21 Jul 2024. This post composed with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
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