Article ID: CBB762043717

The law of refraction and Kepler’s heuristics (2020)

unapi

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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Authors & Contributors
Goulding, Robert
Dong, Hao
Amery, Fiona
Cardona, Carlos Alberto
Martínez-Adame, Carmen
Verboon, Annemieke R.
Concepts
Refraction
Optics
Models and modeling in science
Metaphors; analogies
Physics
Mathematics
Time Periods
17th century
16th century
19th century
Renaissance
Medieval
Ancient
Places
Great Britain
England
Wales
United States
Italy
Greece
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