To clarify the Tycho/Kepler thing... Tycho had the model first (he wasn't enamored by the Copernican model) and then built the observatory to validate it. He recognized he was not a good enough mathematician to use his observations to validate his model, so he hired Kepler, a formidable mathematician, to crunch the numbers. Tycho knew that Kepler was a Copernican, and their relationship was uneasy, since he kept data from Kepler so Kepler wouldn't use it to prove his own Copernican ideas. It wasn't until after Tycho died that Kepler got full access to the observations and discovered that all four models (Ptolemy's geocentric, Copernicus' heliocentric, Tycho's hybrid geo/heliocentric, and Kepler's own pet variant on Copericus' heliocentric) didn't match the data. They all worked well with the pre-Tycho data, but the increased quality of Tycho's data eliminated all of them. Kepler's new theoretical work on the data led him to posit his "laws", which broke the perfect celestial spheres a major part of all the other theories.nferguso wrote:"...Tycho took great measurements, but had a bogus model. It took Kepler 30 years later to fully model Tycho's measurements correctly."
"...A new theory has nothing to do with past experiments, a new theory only relates to new hypothesis and new expreiments. "
Thanks for clearing it all up for me.
Kepler's "Laws" certainly changed how we viewed the planets, but they weren't fully explained until Newton.