Kepler and Mach’s Principle

The definitive ideas that led to the creation of general relativity crystallized in Einstein’s thinking during 1912 while he was in Prague. At the centenary meeting held there to mark the breakthrough, I was asked to talk about earlier great work of relevance to dynamics done at Prague, above all by Kepler and Mach. The main topics covered in this paper are: some little known but basic facts about the planetary motions; the conceptual framework and most important discoveries of Ptolemy and Copernicus; the complete change of concepts that Kepler introduced and their role in his discoveries; the significance of them in Newton’s work; Mach’s realization that Kepler’s conceptual revolution needed further development to free Newton’s conceptual world of the last vestiges of the purely geometrical Ptolemaic world view; and the precise formulation of Mach’s principle required to place GR correctly in the line of conceptual and technical evolution that began with the ancient Greek astronomers.