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Isaac Newton

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Isaac Newton. One of the major flaws with the Copernican system manifested with the retainment of perfect circular orbits, as theorized by Ptolemy, and even with the removal of the equant, Copernicus still had to use some epicycles to explain retrograde. This still left many issues, because this very unnatural movement didn’t make it that much less clunky than Ptolemy’s system. Johannes Kepler, with his first law of planetary motion, provided a solution for this issue. He theorized that planets actually move in an elliptic orbit, with the sun not necessarily at the very center of the ellipse. When taken in account with Copernicus’ idea of the Earth’s rotation, this got rid of the need for epicycles, and provided a much smoother system. In addition, …show more content…

Firstly, the heliocentric system driven by Copernicus disproved the ideas of two, powerful, and at the time, most valid sources, the Ancient world and the Catholic Church. This opened up questioning and curiosity of many other aspects of humanity in the centuries that followed, and in parallel to this the rejection of the theological idea that man has dominance in the universe (SECOND GALE SOURCE). This curiosity led to so many great discoveries across the course of the entire revolution, from chemistry, to calculus, and even biology. Even though heliocentrism occurred as an astronomical endeavor, it by itself influenced the development so many ideas not just used in astronomy. Newton’s laws of physics would never have been possible if not for the heliocentric system to back it up, and in fact, nearly all of Kepler’s, Newton’s, and Galileo’s work described above built on Copernicus’ ideas. It can also be said that the development of heliocentrism gave rise to modern scientific method. The mathematical and rigorous approaches to proof all used by Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus set a bar of quality differed greatly from the very assumptive and proofless explanations for many phenomena, many set by the Church or the Bible. The idea of developing an idea slowly, over the course of many people’s lives, while using mathematical proofs is essentially the process that occurs today when developing important

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