This is the Table of Contents and the Bibliography for my series on the early history of astronomy.
Posts
Part 1: From Kepler to Ptolemy
From Kepler to Ptolemy 1: Introduction. Ptolemy gets a bum-rap.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 2: Deferents and epicycles. Scaling.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 3: Eccentricity and ellipticity: Why Ptolemy has eccentric circles, but still circles.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 4: Speed laws: Equant, area, and inverse distance. Formulas and a numerical example (with graph).
From Kepler to Ptolemy 5: Origin of the deferent, epicycle, and equant. Retrograde motion; size and spacing of the retrograde loops. Tree analogy.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 6: Recap. Kepler’s list of the advantages of heliocentrism. Evaluating Ptolemy: presentism and Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers.
Part 2: The Full Ptolemy
From Kepler to Ptolemy 7: Terminology: Celestial coordinates (latitude and longitude), inclination, nodes, equinoxes (and their precession), perihelion, aphelion, line of apsides, opposition and conjunction (inferior and superior), periods (sidereal and synodic).
From Kepler to Ptolemy 8: Ptolemy’s solar model, and what it should have been. Bisection of the eccentricity, and why the solar model has twice the eccentricity it should have.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 9: Ptolemy’s lunar model. Why it’s more complicated than you’d expect (evection).
From Kepler to Ptolemy 10: The model for the outer planets. What he should have done with the epicycles: true Sun vs. mean Sun.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 11: Venus.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 12: Mercury, the eccentric planet. Its model is extra-complicated, but not why you think.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 13: Ptolemy’s latitude theory. A Rube Goldberg beginning, but he finally got it right.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 14: Cycle Counts. Spoiler: not even close to 80.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 15: The Planetary Hypotheses. Ptolemy’s cosmology: spheres and tambourines.
Part 3: Kepler
From Kepler to Ptolemy 16: Kepler’s works.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 17: The Mysterium cosmographicum. Weinberg’s defense of Kepler’s Polyhedral Hypothesis. The motto, and Kepler’s Zeroth Law.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 18: The Astronomia nova. Tycho’s observations. Instrumentalism and realism, aka actual orbits. Pretzelosis.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 19: Kepler’s three forces. Celestial souls and minds.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 20: The whirlpool force: early thoughts.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 21: The nature of the whirlpool force. Inverse-square vs. inverse-linear.
From Kepler to Ptolemy 22: The libration force.
Bibliography
E. J. Aiton. “Peurbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum: A Translation with Commentary”. Osiris, 3 (2nd series), 1987, pp.4–43,
Stanley E. Babb, Jr. “Accuracy of Planetary Theories, Particularly for Mars”. Isis,
68:3, 1977, pp. 426–434.
William H. Donahue. “Kepler’s Invention of the Second Planetary Law”. The British Journal for the History of Science, 27:1, March 1994, pp. 89–102.
William H. Donahue. Selections from Kepler’s Astronomia Nova. Green Lion Press, 2008.
J.L.E. Dreyer. A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler. Dover, 1953, 2nd rev. ed. of 1906 work, with forward by W.H. Stahl.
James Evans. “On the function and the probable origin of Ptolemy’s equant”. American Journal of Physics, 52, 1984, pp.1080–1089.
James Evans. “The division of the Martian eccentricity from Hipparchos to Kepler: A history of the approximations to Kepler motion”. American Journal of Physics, 56, 1988, pp. 1009–1024. Available online here.
James Evans. The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, Oxford University Press, 1998.
Owen Gingerich. The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. American Institute of Physics, 1993.
Bernard R. Goldstein. “The Arabic Version of Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses“. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 54:4, 1967, pp.3–55.
Elizabeth Anne Hamm. Ptolemy’s Planetary Theory: An English Translation of Book One, Part A of the Planetary Hypotheses with Introduction and Commentary. Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 2011.
Norwood Russell Hanson. “The Mathematical Power of Epicyclical Astronomy”. Isis, 51:2 (June 1960), pp.150–158.
Arthus Koestler. The Sleepwalkers. Macmillan, 1959.
Alexandre Koyré. The Astronomical Revolution. Cornell University Press, 1973.
Thomas Kuhn. The Copernican Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1957.
C.M. Linton. From Eudoxus to Einstein: A History of Mathematical Astronomy. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Andrea Murschel. “The Structure and Function of Ptolemy’s Physical Hypotheses of Planetary Motion”. Journal for the History of Astronomy, 26, 1995, pp.33–61.
Olaf Pedersen. A Survey of the Almagest, Springer Verlag, 2011. (Revised edition, with annotation and new commentary by Alexander Jones.)
Bruce Stephenson. Kepler’s Physical Astronomy. Princeton University Press, 1994. Paperback edition of 1987 edition published by Springer.
Noel Swerdlow. “Ptolemy’s Theories of the Latitude of the Planets in the Almagest, Handy Tables, and Planetary Hypotheses“.
In Wrong for the Right Reasons, Springer, 2005.
Victor Thoren. “Tycho Brahe”. In Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, editors René Taton and Curtis Wilson, Cambridge University Press, 1989. Volume 2 in the series The General History of Astronomy.
Gerald J. Toomer. Ptolemy’s Almagest. Duckworth, 1984.
James R. Voelkel. The Composition of Kepler’s Astronomia nova. Princeton University Press, 2001.
Steven Weinberg. To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. HarperCollins, 2015.
Diagonal Argument 