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Students in an introductory physics class learn a variety of different, and seemingly unconnected, concepts. Gravity, the laws of motion, forces and fields, the mathematical nature of the science - all of these are ideas that play a central role in understanding physics. And one thing that connects all of these physical concepts is the impetus the great scientists of the past had to develop them - the desire to understand the motion of the planets of the solar system. This desire led to the revolutionary work of Copernicus and Galileo, Kepler and Newton. And their work forever altered how science is practiced and understood.
List of contents
Foreword
Introduction
An Introduction to the History of Science
Babylonian Planetary Astronomy
Plato and Saving the Phenomena
Eudoxus and Concentric Spheres
Eccentrics and Epicycles
Equivalence
Astronomy and Physics
Saving the Phenomena Quantitatively
Ptolemy's Exposition of Mathematical Sstronomy
Reality or Mathematical Fiction?
The Greatest Astronomer of Antiquity or The Greatest Fraud in the History of Science?
Islamic Planetary Astronomy
Revival in the West
Copernicus and Planetary Motions
The Copernican Revolution
Breaking the Circle
Isaac Newton and ravity
The Newtonian Revolutiuon
Glossary
Timeline
Bibliography
About the author
Norriss S. Hetherington is the director of the Institute for the History of Astronomy and a Visiting Scholar with the Office of the History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written extensively on the history of astronomy and cosmology, and has edited
Encyclopedia of Cosmology: Historical, Philosophical, and Scientific Foundations of Modern Cosmology, and
Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives.
Summary
Students in an introductory physics class learn a variety of different, and seemingly unconnected, concepts. And one thing that connects all of these physical concepts is the impetus the great scientists of the past had to develop them - the desire to understand the motion of the planets of the solar system.
