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Answering Andy's rhetorical question with An Inconvenient Truth or 2
::It's a fair question about Kepler. I left him out because, as I remember, he really didn't have much to say about ''gravitation,'' but rather about planetary motion. Of course we know that those are two sides of the same coin, so that might be a distinction without a difference. Kepler's third law described orbital periods as a function of radius, and so it was Kepler's third law that allowed Newton and others to reject the constant-gravitational-acceleration model of Galileo, but Kepler's third law itself has nothing to say about gravitation. That's why I left him out. That's just an explanation, though, not a defense. By all means, anyone should of course feel free to add content.--[[User:KSorenson|KSorenson]] 17:25, 11 November 2009 (EST)
::It's a fair question about Kepler. I left him out because, as I remember, he really didn't have much to say about ''gravitation,'' but rather about planetary motion. Of course we know that those are two sides of the same coin, so that might be a distinction without a difference. Kepler's third law described orbital periods as a function of radius, and so it was Kepler's third law that allowed Newton and others to reject the constant-gravitational-acceleration model of Galileo, but Kepler's third law itself has nothing to say about gravitation. That's why I left him out. That's just an explanation, though, not a defense. By all means, anyone should of course feel free to add content.--[[User:KSorenson|KSorenson]] 17:25, 11 November 2009 (EST)
:::We like Galileo, because he thumbed his nose at the establishment, and because nearly everything he claimed as a discovery turned out correct (all but tides, of course). He was the first scientist to use a telescope to explore the heavens. He '''proved''' that not everything in the sky revolves around the earth, because the Jovian satellites (moons) clearly revolved around Jupiter. He's an underdog who kept pushing it until the powers that be told him to shut up and go home.
:::Kepler was more obscure, didn't really discover anything, rocked no boats, and more of a mystic than a practical man of science. He also didn't write very well, compared to Galileo. Sorry but his discovery that the paths of planets around the sun are elliptical rather than circular was just not very interesting - unless you are a student of [[physics]] and [[calculus]]. --[[User:Ed Poor|Ed Poor]] <sup>[[User talk:Ed Poor|Talk]]</sup> 19:33, 11 August 2010 (EDT)