相关论文: Teaching the Kepler laws for freshmen
An interpretation of selected parts of Newton's Principia, with modern notation and methods. Keplers Laws are derived from an inverse square law using Newton's methods.
An elementary derivation of the Newton "inverse square law" from the three Kepler laws is proposed. Our proof, thought essentially for first-year undergraduates, basically rests on Euclidean geometry. It could then be offered even to…
Newton's deduction of the inverse square law from Kepler's ellipse and area laws together with his "superb theorem" on the gravitation attraction of spherically symmetric bodies, are the major steps leading to the discovery of the law of…
In this article, we review the main results of Volume I of Newton's Principia which relates Kepler's law of planets and universal gravitation. In order to clarify the reasoning of Newton, elementary and simple proofs are given to inspire…
The recent non-calculus proof of Kepler's first law succeeds because of an obscure, but valid property of the ellipse.
An elementary proof of Kepler's first law, i.e. that bounded planetary orbits are elliptical, is derived without the use of calculus. The proof is similar in spirit to previous derivations, in that conservation laws are used to obtain an…
This article has a twofold purpose. On the one hand I would like to draw attention to some nice exercises on the Kepler laws, due to Otto Laporte from 1970. Our discussion here has a more geometric flavour than the original analytic…
We explain the solution of the following two problems: obtaining of Kepler's laws from Newton's laws (so called two bodies problem) and obtaining the fourth Newton's law (the formula for gravitation) as a corollary of Kepler's laws. This…
The law of centripetal force governing the motion of celestial bodies in eccentric conic sections, has been established and thoroughly investigated by Sir Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica. Yet its profound implications on the…
Kepler's laws of planetary motion are acknowledged as highly significant to the construction of universal gravitation. The present study demonstrates different ways to derive the law of equal areas for the Earth by general geometrical and…
Proceeding like Newton with a discrete time approach of motion and a geometrical representation of velocity and acceleration, we obtain Kepler's laws without solving differential equations. The difficult part of Newton's work, when it calls…
Although the differential calculus was invented by Newton, Kepler established his famous laws 70 years earlier by using the same idea, namely to find a path in a nonuniform field of force by small steps. It is generally not known that…
Hodographs for the Kepler problem are circles. This fact, known since almost two centuries ago, still provides the simplest path to derive the Kepler first law. Through Feynman `lost lecture', this derivation has now reached to a wider…
The principle that celestial bodies must move on circular orbits or on paths resulting from the composition of circular orbits has been assumed as a constant guide in the astronomical thougth of the peoples facing the Mediterranean sea as…
We review and comment on some works of Euler and his followers on spherical geometry. We start by presenting some memoirs of Euler on spherical trigonometry. We comment on Euler's use of the methods of the calculus of variations in…
Kepler's 2nd law, the law of the areas, is usually taught in passing, between the 1st and the 3rd laws, to be explained "later on" as a consequence of angular momentum conservation. The 1st and 3rd laws receive the bulk of attention; the…
Based on Propostion 6 of his Principia, Newton's geometrical derivation in Propositions 10 and 11 for the radial dependence of the two central forces that lead to elliptical orbits is notoriously difficult. An alternate and more transparent…
In the past, Kepler painstakingly derived laws of planetary motion using difficult to understand and hard to follow techniques. In 1843 William Hamilton created and described the quaternions, which extend the complex numbers and can easily…
During the past 25 years there has been a controversy regarding the adequacy of Newton's proof of Prop. 1 in Book 1 of the {\it Principia}. This proposition is of central importance because its proof of Kepler's area law allowed Newton to…
Lambert's theorem (1761) on the elapsed time along a Keplerian arc drew the attention of several prestigious mathematicians. In particular, they tried to give simple and transparent proofs of it (see our timeline \S 9). We give two new…