kepler third law is being used all the time to discover exoplanets

of which over a hundred are known

 

I've met Geoff Marcy who discovered many of those and was among the very first to find an exoplanet by the wobble method and he wrote in a NYT interview that when he first detected an exoplanet he felt the spirit of Kepler was right there

 

when you infer a planet's presence from watching the star wobble, kepler is right at your elbow telling you what to look for and how to interpret

Kepler is great and his finding the third law in 1618 was approximately the beginning of math-based science

 

Kepler wrote that he first discovered the third law on 8 March 1618 and he didnt believe it and suppressed it and then it came back in full force and dawned on him fully on 15 May 1618. "It stormed the darkness of my mind."

 

I invite you to respect that our mostly dark minds are capable of enlightenment by glimpsing the patterns in nature and to take a moment to reflect on Kepler, and I shall also, this 8 March.

 

you might want to read a bit about Kepler, beforehand. Like today if you have a few minutes

 

IF YOU FIND GOOD STUFF ON THE WEB PLEASE POST IT here in this thread for the rest of us.

 

Some links and quotes i found are here:

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18877

 

what i want to do in this thread is mostly to collect links and quotes, and perhaps anecdotes about Kepler------like did you know his mother was accused of being a witch and narrowly escaped burning?

 

Or, if you know a good book about him, even if it is not online.

 

But, since the third law is so important, and that is specifically what one celebrates on Kepler Day, since he described the experience of finding it, in such colorful detail, and writes the exact moment. since the third law is sort of emblematic, I will also take a post or two to discuss that and say what the third law is. Anybody else can too, less work for me, so go to it if you want.

For those of you who have seen it James Burke covered both Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler quite extensively in his original Connections series for the BBC. He's quite the fascinating man (as was Brahe, but in very, very different ways)

 

It wasn't until that show that I realized that Kepler derived his laws of planetary motion from Brahe's data.