Museo Galileo, Virtual Museum, Keplers Laws

Kepler, who embraced Copernicanism in his youth, strove to identify the harmonic
rule thatin his viewwas used by God in creating the Cosmos. In his Mysterium
Cosmographicum, he formulated the hypothesislater discardedthat the
dimensions of the spheres of the six planets then known were linked to the five
regular solids. The radius of each planetary sphere was determined by its exact fit
between two successive solids.
Kepler later became the assistant of Tycho Brahe, from whom he inherited a corpus
of highly accurate celestial observations. Using Tycho's data, Kepler tried to solve
the arduous problem of determining the orbit of Mars. After many attempts, he
realized the need to abandon the postulate of the circularity of planetary orbits: in
fact, each planet's orbit was an ellipse with the Sun located in one of the foci.
Kepler thus established what is now known as his First Law.
Kepler had previously found that the planets travel on their orbits in non-uniform
motion. In consequence, the segment joining the planet to the Sun covers equal
areas in equal time intervals. This principle, now known as Kepler's Second Law,
implies that the planets move faster when they are closer to the Sun and more
slowly when they are farther away. In so doing, Kepler breached another ancient
dogma: the uniform motion of the planets.
In his Third Law, Kepler states that, for any given pair of planets, the squares of
their revolution periods were in the same proportion to each other as the cubes of
the major semi-axes of their orbits. Kepler thus clarified the exact rule governing
the gradual decrease in the orbital velocity of the planets, proceeding from the
innermost ones to the outermost ones.
Kepler wanted to root his three laws in a physical explanation. He voiced the
hypothesis that the Sun was a magnet capable of exerting on the planets a motive
power whose intensity varied with distance. Kepler saw the planets, too, as
magnets permanently oriented in the same direction. Consequently, in one part of
the orbit, being attracted by the Sun, the planets tended to accelerate and draw
closer to the Sun; in the other part of the orbit, they were repelled by the Sun,
moved away from it, and thus lost velocity.