Renaissance Period

What is the Renaissance?

• the rebirth of science and culture

• major developments include astronomy, humanist philosophy, the printing press, vernacular language in writing. painting and sculpture technique, world exploration, Shakespeare

What did Columbus discover in 1492?

• New World - the lands that Christopher Columbus encountered during his voyages across the Atlantic

Who is Ferdinand Magellan?

• he became the first person to successfully circumnavigate the glove in the early 1500s

Who invented the printing press and what does it do?

• Johannes Gutenberg in 1440

• Though used in China, it allowed Bibles, secular books, printed music and more to be made in larger quantities and reach more people

What are the Renaissance Sciences?

• scholars studied classical texts and that they “resurrected the ancient Greek belief that creation was constructed around perfect laws and reasoning

• there was an escalation in studying astronomy, anatomy and medicine, geography, alchemy, mathematics, and archi as the ancients studied them

Who is Nicholas Copernicus?

• He got a copy of the book of Ptolemy and studied epicycles and found errors of the study

• He came up with his own model of the solar system known as the heliocentric model

• He also saved the problem of retrogade motion w/o epicycles; it occurs roughly when a faster moving planet catches up to and passes a slower moving planet

What book did he write?

• Copernicus wrote De Revolutionibus Irbium Coelestium meaning On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres in 1532

Who is Tycho Brahe?

• He lost his nose in a math-fueled duel, which may have inspires Shakespeare to write Hamlet

  • In result, he got himself a prosthetic nose making him be known as The Man with the Iron Nose

Why did he became an astronomer?

• A solar eclipse in 1500 inspired him and made him realize that science can only progress if there were observations that were systematic, accurate, and nightly

What are his contributions?

• He refined old instruments and built new ones and spent the rest of his life assembling one of the largest bodies of astronomical data in human history

• His observations included a comprehensive study of the solar system specially Mars and accurate positions of more than 777 stars

• He also came up with the Tychonic Model

  • it combines both the geo and heliocentric model

How fortunate is he?

• His uncle, Jorgen, gave his life to save King Frederick II from drowning, making him inherit his uncle’s estate

• The King gave Brahe his favor and generous support

• He was also given the Isand Hven to make an observatory

• Tycho also made a castle on the island called Uraniborg, after the Goddess of the sky Urania

Who is Johannes Kepler?

• He is the mathematical assistant of Tycho Brahe

• He did not get along with Tycho Brahe as he was mistrusted due to Brahe’s fear of his assistant outshining him as the premier astronomer of that era

  • Brahe showed Keppler only a part of his data

  • When Brahe died of mercury poisoning, he then got access to Brahe’s astronomical date-leading to the Laws of Planetary Motion

What are the 3 Kepler’s Law?

Kepler’s First Law

• All planets move about the Sun in elliptical orbits, having the Sun as one of the foci

Kepler’s Second Law

• Describes the speed of a planet travelling in an elliptical orbit around the sun

• States that a line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time, meaning a planet moves faster when it is closer to the Sun and slower when it is farther away.

Kepler’s Third Law

• How long a planet takes to go around the Sun is related to the planet’s mean distance from the Sun

Who is Galileo Galilei?

• He invented the modern view of science, which is the transition from a faith-based “science” to an observation-based science

• The founder of experimental science

• He greatly improved the telescope

• He found this instrument in the Netherlands and he replicated it through trial and error

• He believed in Copernicanism which caused trouble for him and was put in Inquisition and faced life imprisonment

Early Astronomy

• Using the telescope he discovered he made important discoveries:

  1. that four satellites, or moons, orbit Jupiter;

  2. planets are circular disks, not just points of light;

  3. the moon’s surface is not smooth;

     • these are called craters

  4. the sun has sunspots or dark regions;

  5. and Venus has phases like the moon

• He also discovered the rings of Saturn

Who is Isaac Newton?

• Son of local farmer of the same name (died three months before he was born); was a premature baby

• Was insecure and obsessed with his works and had irrational behavior

• Does not wanna be a farmer

What are his discoveries?

1. Optics

   • “White light is a composite of all colors of the spectrum and composes of particles”

2. Motion

3. Mathematics

4. The book, Principia

   • Consists of nearly all variations of physics