7 Facts About Johannes Kepler You Didn't Know

Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer who discovered the three laws of planetary motion. Apart from his contributions to astronomy, he is also known to have pioneered the field of optics. In this post, let's read some amazing facts about Kepler and his work.

Early Affliction

He suffered from small pox at a very early age. The disease left him with a weak eyesight. Isn't it wonderful then how he went on to invent eyeglasses for near-eye and far-eye sightedness?

Introduction to Astronomy

Kepler's childhood was worsened by his family's financial troubles. At the age of 6, Johannes had to drop out of school so to earn money for the family. He worked as a waiter in an inn.

In the same year, his mother took him out at night to show him the Great Comet of 1577 which aroused his life-long interest in science and astronomy.

Copernican Supporter

At a time when everyone was against the heliocentric model of the universe, Kepler became its outspoken supporter. He was the first person to defend the Copernican theory from both a scientific and a religious perspective.

Contemporary of Galileo

Galileo was not a great supporter of Kepler's work especially when Kepler had proposed that the Moon had an influence over the water (tides). It would take an understanding by Newton many decades later which would prove Kepler correct and Galileo wrong.

Pioneer of Optics

Kepler made ground-breaking contributions to optics including the formulation of inverse-square law governing the intensity of light; inventing an improved refracting telescope; and correctly explaining the functioning of the human eye.

Helped Newton

His planetary laws went on to help Sir Isaac Newton derive the inverse square law of gravity. Newton had famously acknowledged Kepler's role, in a quote: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giant(s)."

Kepler's Legacy

There is a mountain range in New Zealand named after the famous astronomer. A crater on the Moon is called Kepler's crater. NASA paid tribute to the scientist by naming their exo-planet finding telescope, Kepler.

When Pioneer of Thermodynamics Was Rejected

Sometimes an idea is so far ahead of the time that when proposed it is met with suspicion and mockery. This happened with English physicist and mathematician James Prescott Joule (1818–1889) when he tried to publish his concept of heat.

Buy in India

Buy in USA

Joule was an avid reader and grew up interested particularly in the field of electricity. He and his brother experimented by giving electric shocks to each other. However, a long-time association with his father's brewery business drew him closer to studying the nature of heat.

In 1843, Joule identified heat as a form of energy. This idea was rejected by the Royal Society because at that time heat was considered to be a "material fluid" which flowed from hot to cold body.

Joule's concept posited that heat was not a fluid but rather a "vibration" from one molecule to another. But at that time (1840s) the existence of atoms and molecules was a disputed subject among scientists. Therefore, Joule's visualization of heat was deemed mere fantasy.

Buy in India

Buy in USA

Despite initial rejection, Joule tried to demonstrate his idea mechanically in 1845. His experiment involved the use of a falling weight, in which gravity does the mechanical work, to spin a paddle wheel in an insulated barrel of water. The spinning increased the temperature of water.

Thus, the experiment not only showed that work and energy were equivalent but also that potential energy of the falling weight was getting converted into heat, hence the rise in temperature. So, heat must be a form of energy.

Joule was laughed at in the beginning but he kept on trying, until his idea became common-sense and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1850.

He went on to work with renowned British physicist William Thomson, aka Lord Kelvin. Together, they developed the absolute temperature scale and published the Joule-Thomson effect, in 1852, a process which has applications in cooling appliances such as refrigerator and air conditioner.

Today, the SI unit of work (and energy) has been named Joule in his honor. He is also widely recognized as one of the founders of thermodynamics as his results led to the formation of the first law.

How Max Born Won Nobel Prize After Getting Suspended

In 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, physicist Max Born, who was Jewish, was suspended from professorship at the University of Göttingen. It was a poor decision since under him Göttingen had become one of the world's most promising centres for physics.

Born had spent over 12 years at the University. Here, he developed the matrix mechanics with his assistant Werner Heisenberg. Furthermore, this was the place where he formulated an interpretation of the probability density function, which won him the Nobel Prize, almost 20 years later, in 1954.

Out of job, he accepted an offer from physicist C. V. Raman to go to Bangalore in 1935 where he taught at the Indian Institute of Science. Then, in 1936, he migrated to the University of Edinburgh where he was offered a permanent chair.

Born became a naturalized British citizen in 1939, one year before the second world war broke out in Europe. During this time, he helped as many of his remaining friends and relatives still in Germany get out of the country thus saving them from persecution.

Despite all the bad memories, Gottingen always remained especially close to his heart because it was there that he came under the guidance of the three most renowned mathematicians of the time: Felix Klein, David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski.

Although Klein didn't approve of Born's particular interest in natural philosophy (physics) he was still impressed by his mathematical prowess. Hilbert especially identified Born's talent and soon hired him as an assistant. Born would often meet Minkowski at Hilbert's house where they would discuss the theory of relativity.

Here, at Gottingen, in 1922, Arnold Sommerfeld sent his student Werner Heisenberg to be Born's assistant. Three years later, they had formulated the matrix interpretation of quantum mechanics. It won Heisenberg his Nobel Prize in physics (1932).

Buy in India

Buy in USA

A year later, Heisenberg wrote a letter to Born in which he said how he had delayed in writing to him due to a "bad conscience" that he alone had received the Prize for work done in collaboration. Born, however, did not mind at all as his contribution to quantum mechanics could not be changed by a "wrong decision" from the outside.

But Born would ultimately win the most coveted prize in 1954 after a fruitful career of 50 years. He was 72 years old at the time of winning. He died in 1970 and is buried in the same cemetery as David Hilbert. Born's life thus came full circle. In 2017, Google honored Born with a doodle on their home page.

Nominated 84 Times For Nobel Prize But Never Won

If there was anybody close to Einstein's genius, it was his compatriot Arnold Sommerfeld. And despite being 10 years Einstein's senior, Sommerfeld was more supportive of the new quantum theory and made many pioneering contributions to it.

Also, did you know that Sommerfeld served in the military for 9 years before becoming a full-time physics professor? Like that, following are 10 amazing facts from Arnold Sommerfeld's life as a tribute to the most under-appreciated physics brain of the 20th century.

1. Since childhood, Arnold Sommerfeld was a quick learner. He received his PhD in physics when he was only 22 years old.

2. He was among the first to acknowledge the validity of Einstein's relativity. His support helped it propel into more of an "accepted status" in the scientific community.

3. Sommerfeld received 84 nominations across 25 years for Nobel Prize in physics (more than any other physicist) but surprisingly, he never won.

4. Yet, he won many times through those he educated and inspired, including (but not limited to) Heisenberg, Pauli, Debye and Bethe.

5. He was the one who introduced the second and the third quantum numbers. They're important because of their use in determining the electron configuration inside an atom.

6. Einstein once told Sommerfeld: "What I especially admire about you is that you have pounded out of the soil such a large number of young talents."

7. Sommerfeld encouraged collaboration from his students. He would home tutor them or meet at a local café to discuss their doubts after a lecture. His successful teaching career was 32 years long.

8. Sommerfeld was also a traveler who traveled around the world in two years (1928-1929) with major stops in India, China, Japan and the US.

9. He wrote to Einstein shortly after Hitler took to power: "I can assure you that the misuse of the word ‘national’ by our rulers has thoroughly broken me of the habit of national feelings that was so pronounced in my case."

10. Sommerfeld died in 1951 in Munich after getting hit by a truck while he was walking with his grandchildren. He was 82 years old. In 2004, department of theoretical physics at the University of Munich was named after Sommerfeld.