Not a Chance: God, Science, and the Revolt against Reason by R. C. Sproul & Keith Mathison

Author:R. C. Sproul & Keith Mathison [Sproul, R. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science—Philosophy, Chance, Cosmology, REL067030, Serendipity in science
ISBN: 9781441246554
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Copernicus is celebrated for challenging the grand assumption of geocentricity. For that challenge he created a scientific revolution. Yet there were more assumptions that needed to be challenged. As Ferris notes, Copernicus assumed both circular orbits and constant velocities.

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)

It belonged to Johannes Kepler to challenge and correct these persistent assumptions. Kepler’s stormy and dysfunctional apprenticeship under the martinet Tycho Brahe is documented by Ferris. Wrestling with the excruciating problem of the orbit of Mars, Kepler labored for years with no success. Finally he solved the conundrum: “My first mistake was in having assumed that the orbit on which planets move is a circle. This mistake showed itself to be all the more baneful in that it had been supported by the authority of all the philosophers, and especially as it was quite acceptable metaphysically.”2

Ferris relates the conclusion of the tale:

In all, Kepler tested seventy circular orbits against [Brahe’s] Mars data, all to no avail. At one point, performing a leap of the imagination like Leonardo’s to the moon, he imagined himself on Mars, and sought to reconstruct the path the earth’s motion would trace out across the skies of a Martian observatory; this effort consumed nine hundred pages of calculations, but still failed to solve the major problem. He tried imagining what the motion of Mars would look like from the sun. At last, his calculations yielded up their result: “I have the answer,” Kepler wrote to his friend the astronomer David Fabricius. “. . . The orbit of the planet is a perfect ellipse.”

Now everything worked. Kepler had arrived at a fully realized Copernican system, focused on the sun and unencumbered by epicycles or crystalline spheres. (In retrospect one could see that Ptolemy’s eccentrics had been but attempts to make circles behave like ellipses.)3

Figure 7

Kepler’s Model of the Universe

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