Johannes Kepler Quotes
wheresoever the earth may be placed, or whithersoever it may be carried by its animal faculty, heavy bodies will always be carried towards it.
Kepler, Johannes. New Astronomy. 1609. Translated by William H. Donahue, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 55.
This is an amazing observation for the time. Socrates did not think it impossible for man to rise above the atmosphere and he realized that the perspective gained from observation of earth would be invaluable. For an experience with looking at the earth from outer space, try “Google Earth.”
He was the first known person who realized that the earth revolved rapidly about its own axis—which few believed in his day and into modern times until Copernicus (See {590327}). Intuitively, most people assumed that if the earth were spinning, the people and things would fly off. Most ancients believed that the earth was stationary and the heavens were moving because they could see the stars move.
This quotation illustrates how scientifically sophisticated some of the Founding Fathers were.
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer. He is a key figure in the 17th-century scientific revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. These works also provided one of the foundations for Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
