Tag Archives: Johannes Kepler

Angular Momentum

I have always had a tenuous relationship with the concept of angular momentum, but recently my concerns resurfaced when I did my studies on Kepler, and in particular his “equal areas law” and Newton’s elegant geometric proof. I love the fact that a simple geometric argument, seemingly totally divorced from the physical situation, can provide an explanation for why the line from the Sun to a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal time as the planet orbits the Sun, solely under the influence of the gravitational force between them. However, modern physics books invariably cite the conservation of angular momentum as the “explanation.” I indicated before in my “Kepler’s Laws and Newton’s Laws” essay that this “explanation” irritated me. In this essay I go into detail about my reservations concerning this line of argument. See Angular Momentum.

Meditation on “Is” in Mathematics II – Mathematical Reality

This post continues a meditation on the nature of mathematics begun in Part I. It involves the perennial question about whether mathematics is invented or discovered, and consequently evokes questions about mathematical reality. This subject is probably of little interest to most people, and even most mathematicians. But the extremely heavy involvement of mathematics in the descriptions of quantum mechanics, and the even more mathematically abstruse excursions into ideas such as string theory in an effort to wed quantum mechanics to general relativity, force us to confront the central place mathematics has in “explaining” our physical reality. Of course, this essay has no definitive answers, and leaves the situation as a mystery.  See Meditation on “Is” in Mathematics II – Mathematical Reality.

Cutting Elliptical Pizza into Equal Slices

Having immersed myself in studying Kepler’s discovery that the planetary orbits were ellipses, I was immediately aware of how the British mathematician, Katie Steckles, justified her technique to cut an elliptical pizza into equal slices in her video of 14 March 2017. In her video Katie makes the claim that the result of any affine transformation of the circular pizza cut into equal sectors will also be a set of equal area slices. I made an attempt to substantiate these remarks. See Cutting Elliptical Pizza.

Kepler’s Equal Areas Law

I have long been fascinated by Newton’s proof of Kepler’s Equal Areas Law and wanted to write about it. Of course, others have as well, but I wanted to emphasize an aspect of the proof that supported my philosophy of mathematics.

Before I get to Newton, however, I wanted to discuss how Kepler himself justified this law, since his approach has a number of fascinating historical aspects to it. I have previously discussed Kepler’s ellipse and in the process of doing that research, I came across a number of articles about how Kepler arrived at his equal areas law. One notable result is that even though now we call the idea that a planet orbits the Sun in an elliptical path with the Sun at one focus, Kepler’s First Law, and the idea that the line from the Sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, Kepler’s Second Law, Kepler actually discovered these laws in reverse order. See Kepler’s Equal Areas Law

Kepler’s Ellipse

I had been exploring how Kepler originally discovered his first two laws and became fascinated by what he did in his Astronomia Nova (1609), as presented by a number of researchers. Among the writers was A. E. L. Davis. She mentioned that the characterization of the ellipse that Kepler was using was the idea of a “compressed circle,” that is, a circle all of whose points were shrunk vertically by a constant amount towards a fixed diameter of the circle. I did not recall ever hearing this idea before and tried to track down its origin together with a proof — futilely, Davis’s references notwithstanding. I then tried to prove it myself. It was easy to do with analytic geometry. But in the spirit of the Kepler era (before the advent of Fermat’s and Descartes’s beginnings at fusing algebra and geometry) I tried to prove it solely within Euclid’s plane geometry. Some critical steps seemed to come from the great work of Apollonius of Perga (262-190 BC) on Conics. But for me a final elegant proof was not evident until 1822 when Dandelin employed his inscribed spheres. See Kepler’s Ellipse.

In the process of exploring the compressed circle idea I acquired an immense appreciation and regard for Kepler and his perseverance in the face of the dominant paradigm of his era, namely, the 2000 year old idea that the celestial motions were all based on the most perfect motion of all, that of circles. The kinds of extremely laborious calculations he went through (just prior to the invention of logarithms by John Napier) were daunting, especially considering the trials he was undergoing in his personal life (trying to survive the religious destruction between Catholics and Protestants, along with defending his mother against charges of witchcraft).

Kepler’s Laws and Newton’s Laws

Years ago (1963) I got the paperback The Calculus:A Genetic Approach, by Otto Toeplitz, which presented the basic ideas of the differential and integral calculus from a historical point of view. One thing Toeplitz did at the end of his book that I had not seen in other texts was to show the equivalence of Kepler’s Laws and Newton’s Law of Gravity. (Since 1963 David Bressoud has developed this theme in his excellent 1991 text.) I thought I would try to emulate Toeplitz’s approach with more modern notation (vectors) and arguments in hopes of extracting the essential ideas from the clutter.

A by-product of this effort was to reveal strongly the different paths that physics and mathematics follow in understanding physical reality.  The mystery is that the mathematics ends up describing the physics so well.  I will return to this theme a number of times in other posts.  See Kepler’s Laws and Newton’s Laws.