History and context of journalism lecture/reading three:

The Rise of Science:
The development of science is on that separates the modern world from earlier centuries and influenced modern philosophy greatly. Descartes is considered to be a creator of 17th century science, though Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton were more notable.
Men who founded modern science are said to have to merits: immense patients  in observation and great boldness in framing hypothesis. The second merit is said to be a characteristic of early Greek philosophers, the first, to a degree, existed in later astronomers of antiquity. Though, both merits were not possessed among the ancients.

Copernicus:
Copernicus was devoted to astronomy and came to believe that the sun was the center of the universe and the the earth had two-fold motion - diurnal rotation and annual revolution around the sun. His greatest work id considered to be 'De Revolutionibus Oribum Celestium', said to have influences of Pythagoras. Copernicus suggests in his writings that the celestial movements of planets, because they are 'axiomatic', must be circular and uniform, influenced by aesthetic motives.
He knew that could be known, at the time, about apparent motions of the heavenly bodies on celestial sphere and perceived diurnal rotation of the earth was a more economical hypothesis than the revolution of all celestial spheres.
Copernicus came up with his own idea of the merits of astronomy:
1) Recognition that what had been believed in ancient times was false.
2) Test of scientific truth is a patient collection of facts combined with guessing as to laws binding the facts together. .


Brahe:
Held the idea that the sun and moon go around the earth but other planets go around the sun .
His views were considered to be against aristotles view that everything is unchanging above the moon. He rejected this because, according to his observations:
1) there was an appearance of a new star which had no daily parallax and must therefore be more distant than the moon.
2) derived from the observation of comets; also found to be distant.
Brahe was well know for his observations and created his own catalouge of stars and noted the position of the planets over many years, during these observations Kepler became his assistant.

Kepler:
Kepler adopted a heliocentric theory much like Copernicus but was show through investigation it was incorrect. Again, like Copernicus, Kepler was influenced by Pythagorism  and lead him to follow Plato's 'Timaeus' in supposing cosmic significance must attach to 5 regular solids. His greatest discovery was the three laws of planetary motion:
1) The planets describe elliptic orbis, which the sun occupies one focus.
2) The joining a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times.
3) The square of the periods of revolution of a planet is proportional to the cube of average distance from the sun.
Though the first two laws can only be proven by Mars.

Galileo:
Galileo was one fo the greatest  of founders of modern science. he first discovered the importance of acceleration in dynamics. Acceleration means change if velocity. from this he established the law of falling bodies, which says when a body is falling freely its acceleration is constant, expect in so far as resistance of air my interfere; this is the same for all bodies.