Authors: Gopi Krishna Vijaya
The original form of Kepler’s Third Law contains a caveat regarding the requirement of small eccentricities – a fact that has been missed by the traditional Newtonian derivations. This constraint is analyzed, and a re-clarification of the real meaning of “mean distance” in the law is provided, by following up the indications given by Kepler in the Harmonices Mundi. It is shown that the modified expression for the “mean distance” not only clears up conceptual difficulties, but also removes a discrepancy found by Kepler for Mercury. Based on this re-evaluation, the result of ignoring the small-eccentricity constraint is analyzed in the Propositions XXXII-XXXVII in the Principia. It is seen that there are several conceptual and mathematical mistakes that are inevitable with the Newtonian form of Kepler’s Third Law.
Comments: 14 Pages.
Download: PDF
[v1] 2018-01-18 10:52:05
Unique-IP document downloads: 191 times
Vixra.org is a pre-print repository rather than a journal. Articles hosted may not yet have been verified by peer-review and should be treated as preliminary. In particular, anything that appears to include financial or legal advice or proposed medical treatments should be treated with due caution. Vixra.org will not be responsible for any consequences of actions that result from any form of use of any documents on this website.
Add your own feedback and questions here:
You are equally welcome to be positive or negative about any paper but please be polite. If you are being critical you must mention at least one specific error, otherwise your comment will be deleted as unhelpful.