Listed here are some of the web links I’ve used in teaching 109.
I began constructing this site in 1995, but keep adding
to it…
The flashlet we used to prove
it.
The perfectly symmetrical shapes that Plato believed were
the shapes of atoms.
The path of the Sun through the zodiac
in the summer months.
A flashlet
showing the relative motions of the Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury.
A flashlet of
the Moon passing into the Earth’s shadow, and how it appears from Earth.
A very cool Nasa
site which will show you how any planet (or the Moon) looks right now as seen
from Earth.
Planet
with Different Orbital Plane
Ptolemy knew that the paths of the planets could not all
lie in one plane—this is why he was forced to add to his cycles and epicycles
and up-and-down motion he could not reduce to a combination of circular motions.
The
Tusi Couple: al-Tusi’s explanation of how
up-and-down motion could be
constructed from two purely circular motions.
(And a picture.)
Aristotle’s Universe
and Copernicus’s
Galileo’s
Sketch of the Moons of Jupiter
One of Galileo’s first discoveries with his telescope was
that Venus had phases just like the Moon.
Galileo’s Beam that Breaks when
Scaled Up
The Sun goes round the Earth,
the planets go round the Sun.
Tycho Brahe Home
Page: the nose, the moose, etc.
Kepler’s
Platonic Solar System
Newton’s Circular Acceleration
Model
Young’s
Interference Experiment
Synchronizing clocks
on a Train
Appearance of a Set
of Moving Clocks
A
cosmopolitan trading town, reasonably open to new ways of thinking.
Imports geometry from
Knew Thales, formed a
cult, proved a theorem, most likely proved the square root of 2 irrational.
Apparently based on
Pythagorean principles.
