Copernicus's Revolutionary Challenge to Ptolemy's Theory

Page 2:Copernicus Challenges Ptolemy

Ptolemy, was a greek astronomer, thinker, rationalist, and geographer. His ideas about the planets were that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun and other planets orbited the earth. His thoughts were accepted for 1,400 years.

Copernicus challenged Ptolemy’s theories. After Copernicus studied the movements of the planets, he tried to find a different explanation for how the planets move. He came to the conclusion that the planets orbit the sun. This would make complex patterns unnecessary to explain his observations. This theory contradicted Ptolemy’s theories by giving a different explanation of how the planets moved. Copernicus also created a book thought to have marked the

He was the first to study the sky with a telescope, in doing this he discovered craters and mountains on the moon. His other discovery was that moons orbit Jupiter. Galileo also learned about mechanics, or the study of objects and motion. He observed and he did experiments to test his observations. He is the “father of experimental science” due to this.

Sir Isaac Newton was an english scientist who published the book Principia Mathematica in 1687 which marked the highpoint of the Scientific Revolution. Newton reviewed work of previous scientists, added his own ideas, and identified four theories that described how the physical world worked. Some of his theories are laws due to how they have been proven so many times. For example, on law is the law of gravity, that gravity is the force that attracts objects to each other, makes objects fall to the ground, and keeps the planets in orbit. The other laws are the laws of motion. Newton gave the idea that the universe is a machine, and that machine has to follow certain laws. Newton also invented calculus and discovered light is made up of all the colors of the

The reason it was wrong was because there was a continent Ptolemy and Europeans weren’t aware of. This was important because European scholars started to doubt Greek authorities. Nicolaus Copernicus discovered that planets circled or orbited the sun. This was important because then the Scientific Revolution started and it caused other scientists to start to observe the sky too. Johannes Kepler found out that all the planets move in an elliptical orbit. This was important because it helped to prove Copernicus’s theory and Kepler’s basic ideas are still accepted today. Sir Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity, laws of motion, that light is made up of all the colors of the rainbow, and he invented calculus. These discoveries are important because they were the basis for scientific study up to the 1900’s, his research on light was the basis for the reflecting telescope, and he taught scientists how the physical world works and how the planets stay in orbit. There were many new inventions in the Scientific Revolution. Zacharias Janssen, a dutch lensmaker, created a simple microscope in around 1590. It was used as a scientific instrument analyze a drop of water in the mid-1600s by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Microscopes are important and are still used today to analyze organisms invisible to naked eye. In 1593, the thermometer was created to measure temperature by Galileo. The importance of this was that it previously there was no