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Void Points, Rosettes, and a Brief History of Planetary Astronomy

Abstract

Almost all models of planetary orbits, from Aristotle through Newton, include void points, empty points in space that have an essential role in defining the orbit. By highlighting the role of these void points, as well as the rosette pattern of the orbit that often results, I bring out different features in the history of planetary astronomy and place a different emphasis on its revolutionary changes, different from those rendered in terms of epicycles or the location of the earth.

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References

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  2. Ibid., p. 140.

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  4. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture. Translation by Ingrid D. Rowland. Commentary and Illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 111.

  5. Aristotle, On the Heavens. With an English Translation by W.K.C. Guthrie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press and London: William Heinemann, 1960), p. 345.

  6. Barbour, Discovery of Dynamics (ref. 1), p. 174; emphasis in the original.

  7. Michael Hoskin, “Astronomy in Antiquity,” in Michael Hoskin, ed., The Cambridge concise history of astronomy (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 18–47, on p. 45. On the realist aspects of Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses, see also Alan Musgrave, “The Myth of Astronomical Instrumentalism” in Essays on Realism and Rationalism (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 17–51.

  8. Barbour, Discovery of Dynamics (ref. 1), p. 151.

  9. Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 15001700. Second Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 23.

  10. Quoted in Michael Hoskin and Owen Gingerich, “Medieval Latin astronomy” in Cambridge concise history (ref. 7), pp. 68–93, on p. 87.

  11. Paraphrasing Barbour, Discovery of Dynamics (ref. 1), p. 175.

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  14. For details on this complicated arrangement, see Dreyer, History of Astronomy (ref. 3), pp. 331–332, or C.M. Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein: A History of Mathematical Astronomy (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 135–137.

  15. Bruce Stephenson, Kepler’s Physical Astronomy (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987), p. 30.

  16. Barbour, Discovery of Dynamics (ref. 1), p. 275.

  17. Johannes Kepler, New Astronomy [1609]. Translated by William H. Donahue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). p. 54.

  18. Johannes Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy [1618]. Translated by Charles Glenn Wallis in Hutchins, Great Books (ref. 12), pp. 839–1004, on p. 855.

  19. Hoskin, “Astronomy in Antiquity” (ref. 7), pp. 41–42.

  20. Stephenson, Kepler’s Physical Astronomy (ref. 15), pp. 112–113.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Tony De Luz of the Northern Arizona IDEA Lab for drawing all of the splendid pictures. I also thank Roger H. Stuewer for his very careful editing. The final product is much improved by both of their contributions.

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Correspondence to Peter Kosso.

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Peter Kosso teaches philosophy of science at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.

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Kosso, P. Void Points, Rosettes, and a Brief History of Planetary Astronomy. Phys. Perspect. 15, 373–390 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-013-0112-6

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Keywords

  • Aristotle
  • Eudoxus
  • Vitruvius
  • Apollonius
  • Hipparchus
  • Ptolemy
  • Nicolaus Copernicus
  • Georg Peurbach
  • Georg Rheticus
  • Tycho Brahe
  • Johannes Kepler
  • Isaac Newton
  • planetary orbits
  • epicycles
  • void points
  • rosettes
  • history of astronomy