Whatsoever is discovered by men of a later day must none the less be referred to the ancients, because it was the work of a great mind to dispel for the first time the darkness the discovery who hoped that the discovery could be made.
Seneca Quaestiones Naturales
Questions to Explore:
What happened to the knowledge of the
ancient astronomers after the fall of the
Roman Empire?
How is it possible for the heliocentric
model of Copernicus to account for the
diurnal motion of the celestial objects, the
annual motion of the Sun, and the
complicated motions of the planets?
What does the heliocentric model have to
say about the orbital distances and periods
of the planets?
Why did Tycho Brahe, the great
observational astronomer, reject the
heliocentric model of the solar system?
How were Tycho’s observations used by
Kepler to produce his laws of planetary
motion?
What are the shapes of planetary orbits?
How does the speed of a planet’s
revolution depend on its distance from
the Sun?
How did the telescopic observations of
Galileo support the heliocentric model of
the solar system?
What finally convinced the world that the
Earth revolves around the Sun rather than
the other way around?
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