Nicolas Copernicus

- a Polish scholar working at the University of Padua in northern Italy.

- he wrestled with the paths of planetary orbits.

. Copernicus' solution was basically geometric

Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Worlds, published in 1543

Plato and Pythagoras who believed in a heliocentric (sun centered) universe

after Copernicus' death in 1543

Johannes Kepler

- successor of Tycho Brahe who is using only the naked eye, tracked the entire orbits of various
stars and planets.
- a brilliant mathematician who had a mystical vision of the mathematical perfection of the
universe that owed a great deal to the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras.

Galileo

- the first to successfully use math to define the workings of the cosmos.
- an Italian astronomer, armed with a new invention, the telescope, which would further shatter
the old theory and lead the way to a new one.
- , The Starry Messenger (1611)
- , in 1632, Galileo published his next book, Dialogue on the Great World Systems
- Galileo got his point across by having the advocate of the Church and Aristotelian view 34
named Simplicius (Simpleton).
- He was quickly faced with the Inquisition and the threat of torture.
- Galileo's work was the first comprehensive attack on the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmic model.
- Galileo was still enthralled with perfect circular motion and, as a result, did not come up with
the synthesis of all these new bits of information into a new comprehensive model of the
universe.

Isaac Newton

- Newton had to invent a whole new branch of math, calculus, for figuring out rates of motion
and change.
- The genius of Newton in physics, as well as William Harvey in medicine and Mendeleev in
chemistry, was not so much in his new discoveries, as in his ability to take the isolated bits and
pieces of the puzzle collected by his predecessors and fit them together.
- His three laws of motion were simple, could be applied everywhere, and could be used with
calculus to solve any problems of motion that came up.
- Newton's work also completed the fusion of math promoted by Renaissance humanists
- The printing of Newton's book, Principia Mathematica, in 1687 is often seen as the start of the
Enlightenment (1687-1789).