Cometaria and the demonstration of Kepler’s 1 （Cometaria和开普勒的示范1）.pdf

Cometaria and the demonstration of Kepler’s 1st and 2nd laws Martin Beech Campion College, The University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, S4S 0A2. Introduction Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) empirically derived1 and published his three famous laws of planetary motion during the first two decades of the 17th century, and they may be stated as follows: 1. Planets move along elliptical orbits, with the Sun at one focus 2. The Sun-planet radius vector sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time 3. The cube of a planet’s orbital semi-major axis is proportional to the square of its sidereal period. The initial reactions to Kepler’s annunciation of his laws were, apparently, ones of mixed emotion. The first law, for example, was received with basic favour by his immediate contemporaries, but his second and third laws were viewed as being something altogether rather ‘suspicious’2 and, indeed, most astronomers simply choose to ignore them throughout the greater part of the 17th 3 century . Isaac Newton eventually explained the physical principles underlying Kepler’s laws in his Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, but the practical teaching problem of demonstrating the laws ‘in action’ to, say, a classroom bound audience of astronomy students, remained steadfastly unsolved. At issue in the model demonstration situation is the point that Kepler’s laws are not inherently geometrical, and consequently they cannot be fully described by devices constructed with simple circular gears, levers and/or springs4 . Starting in the first half of the 18th century, however, a number of ‘popularizers’ of science did construct mechanical devices that attempted to illustrate the first two of Kepler’s laws. Known various