Slide 5 of 8
Crucial to the story that culminated in Newton's Law of Gravitation
were the detailed observations of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe
(1545-1601) who spend twenty years of his life on an island given to
him by the King of Denmark cataloguing the positions of the planets
and thousands of stars. On his deathbed, Brahe gave his notebooks to
the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, on condition that he use the
data to prove that the Earth was at the center of the solar system,
contrary to the Copernican view. Kepler spent twenty five years
painstakingly analyzing Brahe's data. He did not of course prove the
Earth to be at the center of planetary motion,
but he did come up with three amazingly simple, empirical
laws that the motion of all the planets seemed to obey.
