AS101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Free Fall, Cn Tower, Scientific Method
Document Summary
Tycho brahe: wealthy, eccentric, meticulous observer (created his own observatory, all naked eye only) Johannes kepler: not wealthy, deeply religious, meticulous analyst (incredibly talented at mathematics and making models) Kepler and brahe were opposite, one an observer, the other an analyst. Kepler was hired by tycho, later began work on analyzing mars" unusual orbit 8 years (inherited a goldmine of data after tycho died) Orbits of planets are ellipses (stretched out circle)with the sun at one focus. An ellipse has a semimajor active of one half. A closed curve with two special points inside called foci. How to make an ellipse: distance from one focus to any point on the ellipse curve, and then back to the other focus is always the same for the particular ellipse. A circle is a special kind of ellipse. Eccentricity of an ellipse (given by the value e ) tells you the extent of stretching.
