Who is the scientist who devised the laws of planetary motion?
Kepler, who was nicknamed “The Sleepwalker” because he had so many crackpot explanations for planetary motion, formulated the qualitative basis for Newtonian mechanics. Prior to that, he had many wacky theories involving Platonic solids, musical harmonies and many other explanations. Then he had the idea that planetary orbits are elliptical with the sun located at one focus, and that the speed of the planets varied such that the line connecting the sun and the planet would sweep out an equal area over an equal time period at any given time period in its orbit. Then he went back to musical harmonies! After a bit of thought, he realized his ellipse idea had merit and changed his mind yet again. Isaac Newton heard about Kepler’s ellipse theory, and analyzed it with the new mathematical techniques he had developed, which are now called differential and integral calculus. He used these new tools to unify the physics of motion for both terrestrial and celestial motion, and published them in
