Kepler's Orbits

Kepler's planetary laws,

Many great names followed Galileo building on his brilliant work. So it is important to be very clear about exactly what he did, and did not prove, to avoid inherting as confirmed unproven principles. By which of course I mean the existence or not of time.

For example, Johannes Kepler observed the motion of the planets in the heavens and worked out that the line from a planet to its sun always marks out ‘equal areas in equal times’[1].

The astronomer Johnnnes Kepler's discover can be expressed by saying “whatever distance a planet is from its sun, its orbit sweeps an equal area in ‘equal periods of time’ “. This usefully describes an interesting fact, but just using the word ‘time’ does not prove that time exists, or passes from a future to a past.

In fact this expression of Kepler’s law is just another way of saying that ‘an orbiting planet always holds the same amount of energy’. In other words, while a planet has a varying distance from its star (in a sense a ‘height it can fall from’ – or an amount of potential energy) it also has a varying speed (or amount of potential energy). Adding these two amounts of energy always must give the same figure (where could the planet gain or lose energy?). thus an orbiting planet in its elliptical orbit is very similar to a pendulum – holding the same total energy but swapping it between potential and kinetic smoothly and reciprocally

Sir Isaac Newton using his discovery or invention of calculus, and also building on Galileo’s work, was able to show mathematically why Kepler’s observations made such sense. And then to produce extremely accurate equations explaining the motion of the planets in space, the workings of the law of gravity, his three laws of motion and countless other very significant discoveries.

Newton carried out all his work on the backbone of the idea that time was some universally perfect and constant clockwork mechanism creating a totally reliable yet completely invisible framework of perfectly regular and universal ‘Time’ that ‘ticked at a constant rate throughout all of God’s creation’.

And this idea of the existence and reliably ridged nature of time was completely accepted, and functioned perfectly well enough for our needs, until Albert Einstein revealed that time could not possibly be the separate and rigid thing is first seemed. Einstein suggested that to explain our more subtle observations of the universe - in particular some very slight but still significant inconsistencies in the orbit of mercury - ‘Time’ could not be a ridged and separate part of the universe. Instead, he demonstrated that not only did it seem to make sense to merge space and time together to create ‘Space-time’, but also that this Space-time should be stretchable and warpable !

How and why this is scientifically logical Einstein explained in great detail in his works on special and general relativity, theories that have been tested and shown to be fundamentally correct in a myriad of different ways, not least of which in the workings of every single Global Positioning Satellite device we use today.

As I hope to show, while it is evidently clear (e.g. from the fact that GPS clearly works) that relativity is mathematically correct, it can also be shown that what relativity explains need not be explained in terms of time existing and being distorted, but instead, just in terms of matter, forces, and ‘rates of change’ being distorted as described, but simply ‘in the present’.

>>> ∆ 1 What do 'clocks' actually measure P1?