TY - JOUR
T1 - The law of refraction and Kepler’s heuristics
AU - Cardona Suárez, Carlos Alberto
AU - Gutiérrez Valderrama, Juliana
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was funded by Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, The Author(s).
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/1/1
Y1 - 2020/1/1
N2 - Johannes Kepler dedicated much of his work to discover a law for the refraction of light. Unfortunately, he formulated an incorrect law. Nevertheless, it was useful for anticipating the behavior of light in some specific conditions. Some believe that Kepler did not have the elements to formulate the law that was later accepted by the scientific community, that is, the Snell–Descartes law. However, in this paper, we propose a model that agrees with Kepler’s heuristics and that is also successful in anticipating the behavior of light when it passes through a surface that separates two media with different optical densities. This model adopts strategies that were recommended by Kepler in two types of analogies. The obstacles that led to the failure of the two types of analogies are presented in the article, and we argue that the model proposed here could overcome these specific obstacles. Finally, we show how the proposed model could be articulated with Kepler’s metaphysics of light.
AB - Johannes Kepler dedicated much of his work to discover a law for the refraction of light. Unfortunately, he formulated an incorrect law. Nevertheless, it was useful for anticipating the behavior of light in some specific conditions. Some believe that Kepler did not have the elements to formulate the law that was later accepted by the scientific community, that is, the Snell–Descartes law. However, in this paper, we propose a model that agrees with Kepler’s heuristics and that is also successful in anticipating the behavior of light when it passes through a surface that separates two media with different optical densities. This model adopts strategies that were recommended by Kepler in two types of analogies. The obstacles that led to the failure of the two types of analogies are presented in the article, and we argue that the model proposed here could overcome these specific obstacles. Finally, we show how the proposed model could be articulated with Kepler’s metaphysics of light.
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U2 - 10.1007/s00407-019-00236-w
DO - 10.1007/s00407-019-00236-w
M3 - Research Article
AN - SCOPUS:85072124128
SN - 0003-9519
VL - 74
SP - 45
EP - 75
JO - Archive for History of Exact Sciences
JF - Archive for History of Exact Sciences
IS - 1
ER -