Chapter 3

• Ancient civilizations did much with science

• Marked the time of day- St. peter's Square
• Marked the seasons- Stonehenge
• Lunar calendars
• After observing practical use, explain what was going on was
observations that they tried to analyze and often us quantitative methods
to understand nature- Pythagoras and Aristotle

• Pythagoras- earth centered model in which the earth was round

• One big problem with the Earth Centered model was it didn’t explain
retrograde motion.
• Ptolemy solved this with the Ptolemaic model. This model was the planets
moving in small epicycles which explain why it looks like it is retrograde at
times. His theory had to keep being tweaked and it was too complicated,
but he took a ton of data
• Epicycles are small loops that planets make while moving in a larger circle
• Earth circumference is just of 40,000 km
• Copernicus- didn’t believe in the retrograde motion and thought of a sun
centered theory, but couldn't get away from the idea that the rotations
were perfect circles.
• Tycho- saw a supernova and took massive amounts of naked eye data,
but couldn't get a final theory.
• Kepler- discovered the ellipse, an oval around to foci.
• Law 1: the orbit of each planet about the sun is an ellipse with the
sun at one focus
• Law 2: As a planet moves around its orbit it sweeps out equal areas
in equal times. AKA a planet moves faster when it is near the sun and
slower when it is closer to the far point.
• Law 3: Kepler's third law: More distant planets orbit the Sun at
slower average speeds obeying the precise mathematical
relationship of P^2=a^3 where P is the planets orbital periods in
years and A is the average of the closest it gets to the sun along with
the farthest it gets to the sun.
• In each ellipse the closest a planet gets to the sun is Perihelion, the
farthest is Aphelion
• Galileo answered 3 questions, how the earth could be moving? How it
could travel in ellipses? And retrograde motion?
• 1.) Newton's law of motion: remains in motion unless a force acts to stop
it.
• 2.) he disproved circular motion based on non imperfections by noticing
comets and craters on Mars and the Moon
• 3.) he noticed that milky way was way farther away and consisted of more
stars that they though. And he saw moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn and
NOT Earth.
• Ocaam's razor- the idea scientists should side with the simpler of the two
models.
Telescope invented in 1608 by Hans Lippershey, but Galileo's was much
more powerful