Re: Kepler's celestial mechanics

oriel36 wrote: 
anon k wrote:

oriel36 wrote:


You are free to stop responding if you wish, 

Indeed, but I am interested in understanding what it is that you are
trying to say.  While you purport to be clear by restricting yourself to
the recitation of primary sources, you in fact avoid clarity by refusing
to justify, or even to state, your interpretations of those sources.



Again you are free to go and join countless others in not acknowledging
that there is one and only one way to infer heliocentricity through
retrogrades.

Of course we are free to do that, but this is not much good to history of science. Neither is it plausible to assume without rigorous demonstration that there exists only one possible way to infer heliocentricity through retrogrades. I do not immediately see how a proof to that would be achieved, but neither do I see any value of such a proof to a discussion about the history of science.

I celebrate that using the  new medium of the internet,the Copernican
insight  is incredibly easy to understand with little or no elaboration
and I  if you want clarity then the guy in this website does an
excellent job -

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap011220.html

Actually, this web page provides no clarity on the HISTORICAL questions at all because it does not address them. As to the astronomy, it tells me nothing that I do not know, and nothing that I have not already seen myself through my own astronomical observations.

I will refrain from saying what I think of the true explanation, or whether Newton's or Copernicus's is better because, again, it has no relevance in a discussion of history.


See how lively the Copernican insight is and how the planetary
arrangement around the Sun was figured out ,I suspect  the
explanation,whether through the primary sourses of Copernicus,Kepler
Galileo or the recent one seen on the website  would be new to
participants here primarily because the corrupt Newtonian version still
ataches itself like a cancer to real version.To go further would be
negative and that only suits those who are dull and dismal in their
reasoning and presentation of the Copernican insight and experience *

To go even this far is to presuppose a great many metaphysical and aesthetic values that you have not yet explained, and which would seem irrelevant in an historical discussion.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle

Maybe some really intelligent person will create  a beautiful work that
does not treat the pre-Copernican astronomers so badly and treat the
heliocentric astronomers even worse as they suffer at the hands of the
empiricists.

I had not seen this Wikipedia page before; it seems to me that the Copernican Principle is likely a philosophical notion named by philosophers of more recent times, and hence not evidence of Copernican and pre-Copernican astronomy being mis-treated. Maybe you could take up the suggestion on the discussion page of this Wikipedia entry; someone there called for an entry on the Copernican Revolution. I searched for it and was redirected to the Copernican Principle, which seems to me a very foolish redirection.

However, I likewise hope to see good treatment of pre-modern astronomy. I quite admired the book by James Evans, _The History and practice of ancient astronomy_, which goes into the methods of pre-Copernican astronomers in notable depth, and shows their continued use beyond Copernicus's day. Many would attack the book for being too technical, too internalist, but I found the discussions on astronomical instrumentation and computation techniques particularly good evidence for how the pre-modern astronomers thought and worked.

You also insist upon raising philosophical claims (with frequent attacks
ad hominem) instead of historical claims which would be more appropriate
to this newsgroup, and probably more comprehensible.


If you  understand the Newtonian corrupt resolution for retrogrades *
as correct then you are free to go for in justifying the Newtonian
conception you have to find Copernicus and Kepler wrong.It is that
simple.

No, it isn't that simple. An historical discussion should not be concerned about which one is right. Positivism was abandoned in the history of science for very good reason.

Newton was at least consistent in his misconduct making it possible to
trace the wrong turns leading to the present condition where humanity
assumes that Newton represents a progressive advancement on the
Keplerian refinements to the Copernican reasoning.

I never require anybody to go beyond the original Copernican reasoning
into the Keplerian refinement,at the same token,because the Keplerian
framework is intricate it leaves room open for less careful individuals
such as Flamsteed and Newton to hijack and then direct the subtleties
to spurious ends such as the terrestial ballistics agenda applied to
planetary motion.

Now that is very interesting, but I do not see how your conclusions follow from the historical sources. Just how do you argue that Flamsteed and Newton conceived of their work as a 'hijack'? Or is this your own judgement on the matter?

It is an easy transformation to get the earth-based retrogressions from
the sun-centered fram that you attribute to Newton but not only is this
trivial, it is ahistorical to Copernicus's context and not relevant to
discussion about Copernicus in a history of science newsgroup.


The destruction of the reasoning behind the Copernican insight is the
opposite of trivial,it represents an assault on Western achievement and
drains the enjoyable nature out of real astronomy and turns it into an
exercise in imaging through telescopes.

Anyone who actually 'sees' the faster Earth overtaking the slower
moving outer planets on their common heliocentric orbit will know far
more than Newton ever did.


Excuse me if I'm mistaken, but I thought that this 'seeing' of the
overtaking was rather easy.  However, I admit to not having checked
Newton for his conceptualization of the relationshop, and it isn't what
I work on, so I'd be glad to hear from you how it can be determined
that Newton thought about it differently.

The true  relationship between the Earth's axial and orbital motion
,which makes all our lives possible,  was contorted into a cartoon
astronomical view in order to justify the axial rotation of the Earth
to the stellar background,its proponents today fuss and fret over leap
seconds while ignoring that the core 'Equation of Time ' principles
which dictate axial rotation at 15 degrees per hour and 24 hours/360
degrees never  have and never will require a leap adjustment.

This too looks very interesting, but I have to check whether I've understood you correctly: do you propose that the length of the hour be forever determined by the Earth's rotation (the mean solar day?) instead of by the wavelength standard from atomic clocks? That seconds, minutes and hours be lengthened as tidal friction demands it?

If so, you're talking about a very interesting conceptual shift in the history and philosophy of timekeeping: the transition from celestial time to atomic time which, in effect, preserves the celestial time units from the arbitrary moment when the SI second was determined.

In technological terms, this transition also wreaks havoc with the adjustment of clock speeds, because there's not much that the owner of a digital clock can do to slow it down, while the owner of a mechanical clock can continuously adjust the responsiveness or inertia in the escapement. This might be understood as a loss of liberty and ownership over one's own belongings, much as mass-production has also seen happen in food, clothing, building and so on. Full control over one's own property now costs much, much more than when everything was custom-made.

For my part there is nothing remotely difficult in coming to appreciate
how Copernicus figured out the behavior of the planets when seen from
Earth and it is even less difficult to see where Newton made a mess of
the resolution and built on that mess.

Where isn't the only question. One should also ask how and why he did so, and how and why he succeeded.
.

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