Kepler-s-laws Sentence Examples

It is quite evident that Kepler's laws do not in themselves enable us to determine the actual motion of the planets.

He quotes as an instance that Newton in this way added to the planetary appearances contained in Kepler's laws the gravitation of the planets to the sun, as a notion of causality not contained in the appearances, and thus discovered that gravitation is the cause of the appearances.

Newton did indeed first show synthetically what kind of motions by mechanical laws have their ground in a centripetal force varying inversely as the square of the distance (all P is M); but his next step was, not to deduce synthetically the planetary motions, but to make a new start from the planetary motions as facts established by Kepler's laws and as examples of the kind of motions in question (all S is P); and then, by combining these two premises, one mechanical and the other astronomical, he analytically deduced that these facts of planetary motion have their ground in a centripetal force varying inversely as the squares of the distances of the planets from the sun (all S is M).

Conversely, assuming this law of attraction, it can be shown that the planets will move according to Kepler's laws.

Having these data, the position of the planet at any other time may be geometrically constructed by Kepler's laws.

The announcement of the third of " Kepler's Laws " was made ten years later, in De Harmonice Mundi.

If the law of attraction is that of gravitation, the orbit is a conic section - ellipse, parabola or hyperbola - having the centre of attraction in one of its foci; and the motion takes place in accordance with Kepler's laws (see Astronomy).