Kepler's Second Law: Equal Area in Equal Time

harp AP 2010 · Nov 21, 2010

How did Kepler figure out his second law: Equal area in equal time?

zhermes · Nov 22, 2010

harp AP 2010 said:

How did Kepler figure out his second law: Equal area in equal time?

Wikipedia has the derivation. It comes from conservation of angular momentum while following the elliptical path.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws

Matterwave · Nov 23, 2010

zhermes said:

Wikipedia has the derivation. It comes from conservation of angular momentum while following the elliptical path.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_laws

This may be the "modern" overview (modern = after Newton), but since Kepler was around before Newton, I highly doubt he knew anything about how to manipulate orbital angular momentum.

I think Kepler formulated his laws based purely on observational evidence. He noticed from the observations that these 3 "laws" seem to hold. Later Newton proved that these laws are directly derivable from his mechanics and law of gravitation.

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