著者

藤沢 知子 黒星 瑩一

出版者

東京女子大学

雑誌

Science reports of Tokyo Woman's Christian University (ISSN:03864006)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.30, no.3, pp.584-595, 1980-03-18

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Goryu Asada (1734-1799), a physician in the Edo Era who contributed much to the improvement of calendar by invoking new method, is usually given a credit for having discovered Kepler's third law by himself. Although there is no evidence for this assertion at present, we discuss in this note how he could have acquired the numerical results, as to both period of revolution and distance to the sun of each planet from his supposed various observations. Our conclusions are that it would have been an extraordinary painstaking work for him, if he had really made in this way, to arrive at the law expressing the relation between the above two kinds of quantities, and also that the theory of his discovery is nonetheless not improbable with a genius and intuition bestowed on him.