Your feet are somehow still cold despite socks and a blanket, you've barely opened your eyes after 5 hours of sleep and you already have a headache, and you're not quite sure if you just dreamed that your electromagnetics professor assigned a last minute homework or if it's actually due. And wait, under what conditions is light circularly polarized and elliptically polarized? Why can't I remember?!
Don't relate to any of these #feels? Lucky you - all of the above are experiences handpicked from the worst part of finals season as an electrical engineering and/or physics major. Even though I can't imagine myself doing anything besides building stuff and yelling about subatomic particles (remember, stay positive like a proton), sometimes even I become quite gloomy when faced with looming deadlines and a sea of equations. When mired in this dread, something I have decided is necessary so that I don't give up is to constantly be aware that what I am doing is worth the grueling work, and that I love it dearly. It's moments like these where my fixation on fundamental laws of nature comes in handy.
Johannes Kepler. Solid dude. Math nerd. Psyched about space. His three laws describing planetary orbits are something that many people come across in high school or university level physics and forget about soon after. But when I read them for the first time, 15-year-old me wrote down the mathematical expressions - or, as close as I could get - for each law in bright orange marker on the white IKEA desk in my room. While every once in a while the exact statement of the laws got fuzzy in my head, a quick refresher would remind me that while planetary orbits seem to be incomprehensibly vast, their motion can be modeled fairly accurately using concepts from basic physics and classical mechanics. Here are Kepler's three laws, stated in words:
1 - Planets move around the sun elliptically, and the sun is always hanging out at one of the ellipse's foci.
2 - If you draw a line between a planet and the sun, that line is going to cover an equal area in an equal amount of time no matter where the planet and sun are in relation to each other.
3 - the square of the period of any planet is proportional to the cube of the semimajor axis of its orbit. (Wow that came straight from my classical mechanics textbook, but a more digestible statement of the third law is that planets move slowly and sluggishly the further away they are from the sun).
Just consider these statements for a second. You and I, tiny human beings on this vast planet we call home, can not only use our brains to understand how Earth is hurtling along through space, but how other planets we have never actually laid eyes on can do the same. For those of you about to tell me that we have, in fact, seen the planets in our solar system, albeit distantly and through telescope images, you're right - but I counter with the fact that Kepler's laws seem to hold not only in our solar system, but in any situation where you have a bunch of bodies orbiting a central one.
I wrote my final classical mechanics paper this semester on Kepler's Laws, and I'm so glad I did because in the midst of seemingly endless practice problems, I was able to break away for a little while and consider the wonder and beauty of science and how illuminating it is to be able to study it. If you think planets are cool - I mean, come on, of course planets are cool - I would highly encourage reading more into Kepler's work and allowing yourself to be amazed, too.
