- When?
- September 7, 2026 5:00 PM
- Where?
- Feringa 5614.0095
What?
Join us for the first installment of the "Lecture Entertainment Series" for this year! Tamás Görbe will present "An Elementary Proof of Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion". There will be free snacks and drinks at the LES
Four centuries have passed since Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion based on astronomical observations. But why do elliptic orbits follow from Newton's law of universal gravitation? For what kind of forces will the line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweep out equal areas during equal intervals of time? Is it really true that the cube of the mean distances of the planets from the Sun are proportional to the squares of their orbital periods? And what is the hidden symmetry underlying the solvability of the Kepler problem? In this talk, we answer these questions using geometric(!) arguments, which require little preliminary knowledge.