copernicus
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Stephen Hawking worked on understanding the nature of black holes, the origins of the universe, and the theory of everything in physics. He also focused on reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity. In his work, he aimed to explain complex phenomena in the universe and deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws governing it.
It was the result of hard work by Johannes Kepler, working at the start of the 17th century on new observations by Tycho Brahe. Kepler had a set of measurements of the planets' positions, and over a period of months and years he tried to explain the movements of the planets, because they did not exactly fit the old theories of Ptolemy and Copernicus. So he said to himself, let's try an ellipse, and it worked. At that stage he did not have a reason for the elliptical orbit, other than that it fitted the observations. Much later, Newton explained how a planet moving in the Sun's gravity must follow an elliptical orbit.
Neither, try again.
Johannes Kepler found out that planets move in ellipses and move at variable speeds as they travel round the sun. The former theory of Copernicus was not wrong, but Kepler's theory was found to be more accurate when accurate observational methods were developed. Later Kepler's theory was backed up by theory when Newton's law of gravitation came along. However in the 20th century Einstein's theory of relativity produced some small corrections to the Kepler/Newton theory.
The Big Bang theory suggests that the universe began as a singularity around 13.8 billion years ago, expanding rapidly and cooling to form the universe we observe today. It explains the origin and evolution of the universe, the abundance of light elements, and the cosmic microwave background radiation.