Related papers: Around Kepler's "Dream"
Duerer's engraving ``MELENCOLIA I'' was circulated in two versions not previously distinguished. Besides their conspicuous early Renaissance scientific instruments and tools, they contain numerous apparently unreported concealments whose…
Rather than offering chronologically ordered encyclopedic knowledge of a lifetime, only some of the most striking events of the existence of this well-known scientist are here pointed out. Sections: Life; Man of laws; Interest in…
Kepler's primary mission is a search for earth-size exoplanets in the habitable zone of late-type stars using the transit method. To effectively accomplish this mission, Kepler orbits the Sun and stares nearly continuously at one…
One of the greatest discoveries of modern times is that of the expanding Universe, almost invariably attributed to Hubble (1929). What is not widely known is that the original treatise by Lemaitre (1927) contained a rich fusion of both…
In his 1606 De Stella Nova, Johannes Kepler attempted to answer Tycho Brahe's argument that the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis required all the fixed stars to dwarf the Sun, something Brahe found to be a great drawback of that…
Leonhard Euler, the most prolific mathematician in history, contributed to advance a wide spectrum of topics in celestial mechanics. At the Saint Petersburg Observatory, Euler observed sunspots and tracked the movements of the Moon.…
A brief history of the discovery of the expanding universe is presented, with an emphasis on the seminal contribution of VM Slipher. It is suggested that the well-known Hubble graph of 1929 could also be known as the Hubble-Slipher graph.…
The Copernican Principle (which says the Earth and sun are not unique) should have observational consequences and thus be testable. Galileo Galilei thought he could measure the true angular diameters of stars with his telescope; according…
Johannes Kepler's attempt to explain the arrangement of the six innermost planets of the Solar System using his Platonic Solid Model-which postulates that planetary orbits are nested within the five Platonic solids-was ultimately…
The notion that we live in an evolving universe was established only in the twentieth century with the discovery of the recession of galaxies by Hubble and with the Lemaitre and Friedmann's interpretation in the 1920s. However, the concept…
This paper aims to shed some more light on one of the best known phenomena in the field of physics, the Doppler effect, in particular, on its classical version. Although, as mentioned, it is a phenomenon already described more than 150…
NASA's Kepler Mission revolutionized exoplanet science in the early part of the 2010's. Looking back from the perspective of the end of that decade, Kepler appears to have burst upon the scene ready for battle, like Athena springing forth,…
We revisit our 2013 claim [arXiv:1303.7476] that the Universe is the result of a conspiratorial plot, and find that it cannot be trusted, because even the belief in this conspiracy likely results from a conspiracy. On the basis of…
The following translation of Leonhard Euler's "Examination of an Artifice for Propelling a Ship by the Principle of Internal Motion," originally published in 1750, offers a glimpse into a fascinating historical debate in the field of…
Cosmology as an exact physical science is of new date, but it has long roots in the past. This essay is concerned with four important themes in the history of cosmological thought which, if taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive…
This is a historian's view of how modern astronomy data can be used to discuss the shifting historical worldview of Late Antiquity. In this article an attemp is made to construct an approximate model of how the cycles of astronomical…
Neptune was telescopically discovered by Johan Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest in Berlin on 23 September 1846 based on the prediction by Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier. The role German astronomers played in the discovery has…
We examine the equant model for the motion of planets, which has been the starting point of Kepler's investigations before he modified it because of Mars observations. We show that, up to first order in eccentricity, this model implies for…
Annual astrological calendars, practica and prognostications became widespread publications in Europe after the invention of printing presses in the 15th century. Using the national language instead of Latin, the language of the scientists,…
I present the reconstruction of the involvement of Karl Popper in the community of physicists concerned with foundations of quantum mechanics, in the 1980s. At that time Popper gave active contribution to the research in physics, of which…