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More background could be used behind Kepler's Third Law. How did Kepler discover this "third Law"? Ka4gb ( talk) 16:30, 21 February 2020 (UTC) reply

Can somebody make a chapter about the reception of the book? What happened when the church read it? StarTrek8472 ( talk) 12:15, 12 May 2011 (UTC) reply

Can I second this request? It's very difficult to find any source on this topic.

The Astronomia Nova is besides De Revolutionibus the starting point for our idea of the Cosmos, (which was then, the Solar System with the stars as a faraway sphere around it). So, we really need a good description for Wikipedia. Who is carrying it further and better? Edybevk 19:22, 8 January 2007 (UTC) reply

John Nevard, please have a look at WP:LINKSTOAVOID, policy on external links. It says to avoid "unverifiable research," which applies to the case of the anonymous website "Kepler's discovery," and also says to avoid links to "personal web pages," which may also apply to "Kepler's discovery." The LYM site which you removed [1] is not anonymous, and was in fact plagiarized in parody form by the "Kepler's discovery" website. -- Polly Hedra ( talk) 06:44, 16 April 2008 (UTC) reply

Nothing there applies to the better website that doesn't to the LaRouche website. The better website isn't written in the same kind of bizarre pseudointellectual style that characterizes LaRouche material, and it isn't designed as part of a LaRouche organization recruiting tool, as the current LaRouche focus on Kepler's philosophy apparently is. Despite a typically long LaRouchian diatribe, I can't see any accusations of actual plagiarism in the article you've previously cited as evidence. Just because you think LaRouche, And His, Annointed Ones, are the only barrier, in the way of, the Dark Ages, doesn't mean that anyone who provides a proper, concise, well-formatted explanation of a historical piece of geometry is plagiarising the troof. John Nevard ( talk) 13:11, 16 April 2008 (UTC) reply

Why should your personal preferences carry more weight than Wikipedia's rules? BTW for anyone who is actually interested, the documentation on the plagiarism charges re: "Kepler's discovery" is found here. -- Polly Hedra ( talk) 07:18, 24 April 2008 (UTC) reply

That daft article is a particularly good example of a link to avoid. Anyone who isn't trying to use policy in an obstructionist way would realize that the proper, concise, and bizarre and LaRouchian websites the article originally pointed to don't have anything to do with the policies you claimed to draw upon. John Nevard ( talk) 13:43, 25 April 2008 (UTC) reply

argh... (not) bizarre and LaRouchian. John Nevard ( talk) 04:11, 4 May 2008 (UTC) reply

Your comment doesn't make any sense. Also,the rules are as they are for good reason. -- Polly Hedra ( talk) 01:06, 28 April 2008 (UTC) reply

John, the site you have been repeatedly adding is far superior in the sources it cites and its content to the fanciful materials on the site you have been struggling to delete. Keep up the good work. -- SteveMcCluskey ( talk) 16:15, 4 May 2008 (UTC) reply

"e=c/a" appears in the article, with all three letters undefined. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.167.246.75 ( talk) 09:01, 8 August 2008 (UTC) "e" is probably the eccentricity. "a" is probably the semi-major axis of the ellipse. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.4.21 ( talk) 09:13, 8 August 2008 (UTC) "c" is probably the linear eccentricity of the ellipse. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.134.200.136 ( talk) 08:11, 9 August 2008 (UTC) reply

The equation has now vanished.

"Part III of Kepler's work contains his discussion of gravitation,"

Where does this come from? I have found no track of this statement in the given online sources. As far as I know, Isaac Newton developed the gravitational theory, using Kepler's and Galileo's work, but on his own. Kepler supposed some physical reason, but that was not gravitation. Bináris ( talk) 15:47, 14 March 2009 (UTC) reply

He stated the mass of the planet was part of the cause of the orbits he saw. He wrongly thought the mass of the planet increased with orbital distance and that must be why it was slower (inertia). However, in the Introduction, which was first and widely distributed in English, he explicitly talked about gravity, a word with occurances back to 1505. He stated it increased proportionally with mass, that it decreased with distance, that it extended much further than the Earth-moon distance, and that gravity from the moon was the cause of tides. He said it was similar to magnetism. But he said "cognate" bodies, which some have said indicated he did not recognize that it applied from planet to planet, or from sun to planet. He explicitly said between moon and earth, even if the moon was not of the same density, and between stones in space if they were far from the effects of the earth and moon. He also precisely stated where the two stones would come together based on their proportions of mass. This requires knowing that inertia and gravity are proportional to mass, but not necessarily F=ma and 1/r^2 are Newton's two greatest achievements. F=mv and 1/r are wrong, but would have the same conclusion for where two masses would meet. Here's the reference, do a search on "cognate": http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12406/12406-8.txt Hopefully SteveMcCluskey won't keep deleting Kepler's quote on Gravity. Ywaz ( talk) 15:32, 5 December 2010 (UTC) reply

I'm not trying to be difficult, but as I pointed out to you over at Talk:Johannes Kepler, your interpretation goes against scholarly interpretations of this text. That is precisely the reason that Wikipedia's policy on Original Research require that "Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation." I mentioned previously that there are secondary sources dealing with this question. The classic study is, unfortunately, in French: Alexandre Koyré, "La gravitation universelle de Kepler à Newton", Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences, 4 (1951), 638-653. The gist of Koyré's analysis of Kepler's concept can be found in his "The Astronomical Revolution" at p. 202, where he says that for Kepler

"gravity is only the resultant of natural attraction between cognate bodies—stones, or the Moon and the Earth. As for planets, they do not attract each other; nor are they attracted by the Earth; nor by the Sun. Therefore, they are not 'heavy'."

Richard Westfall once alluded ("Hooke and the Law of Universal Gravitation: A Reappraisal of a Reappraisal", The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jun., 1967), pp. 245-26) to the limitations of Kepler's concept in a discussion of Robert Hooke's attempt to produce a law of gravity before Newton:

"If Hooke did not succeed in generalizing to universal gravitation, at least he carried the principle of particular gravities to a higher level of generalization than either Kepler or Roberval had achieved."

I am once again deleting this original research until you provide a reliable secondary source to support your interpretation of Kepler's text. -- SteveMcCluskey ( talk) 16:48, 5 December 2010 (UTC) reply

How can merely quoting the book itself be original research? The last thing you deleted contained only 1 introductory sentence where I tried not to express any thought on the matter. Why are you so determined to keep Kepler's very interesting quote on gravity from being in Wikipedia? I don't disagree with the interpretations you've cited above. But nor do they go against the comments I made above. Also, Kepler probably was like Copernicus and thought gravity also existed on the other planets, but not necessarily between planets or the sun as you say. Ywaz ( talk) 18:59, 5 December 2010 (UTC) reply

Since your words above do not apply to what you're deleting, the best can do is try to read your mind as to why you're refusing to allow Kepler to have any comment on gravity. There was nothing in my edits that implied gravity was between planets or the sun, yet you seem to think they did. So I have added your quote to prevent people from having the same misunderstanding you seem to be having. This is my 4th attempt to try to discover why you're deleting my edits and stating reasons that do not apply to the text. If you do not give an explanation that makes sense, I can't correct my edits to satisfy your needs. Ywaz ( talk) 22:36, 5 December 2010 (UTC) reply

I've added interpretations of the text from the secondary literature and trimmed down the length of the quotation from Kepler—which still seems excessive for an encyclopedia article—but I'll leave it since you're so strongly in favor of keeping it. -- SteveMcCluskey ( talk) 13:56, 7 December 2010 (UTC) reply

Undue weight and misuse of primary sources

I just dropped by the article again and was surprised by the addition of a large number of blockquotes from the Astronomia Nova concerning attraction, without any reflection of the accepted scholarly interpretation of these texts. Besides its problems with misuse of primary sources, the discussion of Kepler and gravity exceeds the discussion of Kepler's laws and Kepler's third law, which raises serious problems of undue weight.

I plan to edit the section to restore some balance to the article:

• First by moving the discussion of gravity to a subordinate place in the article, after the discussions of Kepler's laws.
• Second, by cutting many of the block quotations.

-- SteveMcCluskey ( talk) 18:15, 13 July 2014 (UTC) reply

User:SteveMcCluskey might be worried by all this, but I am not. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.148.174.203 ( talk) 10:41, 9 August 2014 (UTC) reply

In the paragraph entitled "Kepler's Knowledge of Gravity", inverted commas are opened before "better" but never closed.

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I've looked into the source for Reference 9 ( here), and it says that the secant of the largest angle between one of the foci and the center of the orbit is equal to the difference betweeen the major and minor axes of the ellipse. So I recreated it in GeoGebra:

The difference between the axes (the text at the top of the circle) is a little larger than the one said in the book (0.00429). But the highest angle I was able to get was 0.98°, not 5°18', and you can see the point is almost directly above the circle center. So either i did something wrong in Geogebra or the book is not a credible source. I have also not been able to find this on any site as a "condition defining an ellipse".
If the source is incorrect, it should be removed from the page. If it is correct, it should probably be added to the Ellipses article, as it isn't even there.
-- Scientia Potentia Est.( talk) 15:44, 11 July 2021 (UTC) reply