@mes's thread

Kepler's First Law: Planets Revolve around the Sun in an Ellipse

In this video, I derive Kepler's 1st law of planetary motion entirely from Newton's second law of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation, while making extensive use of the calculus of vector functions, to prove that a planet orbits the Sun in an elliptical orbit where the Sun is a focus. This extensive proof demonstrates the power that calculus is in explaining observational astronomical data directly from the laws of physics.

#math #vectors #calculus #ellipse #keplerslaws