European History, Part 25

Question 1: Explain the role that Adam Smith played in the laissez-faire movement.

Answer 1: Adam Smith was a philosopher and an economist who lived in Scotland during the early to late eighteenth century, and he played an extremely important role in the laissez-faire movement. Smith wrote a book entitled An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in which he discussed his views on the laissez-faire system and the mercantile system. This book allowed Smith to describe his belief that the economy of a nation would be stronger if it was left to its own devices or, in other words, if the country allowed the economy to function with as little government interference as possible. Smith also described his belief that the wealth of a nation could not be measured in gold or silver, but it instead should be measured in terms of the number of goods that a nation produces. This book, as a result, was extremely important to the laissez-faire movement because it defined the major economic concepts on which the movement was founded.

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Question 2: Describe some of the major accomplishments of Johannes Kepler.

Answer 2: Johannes Kepler was an astronomer who lived in Germany during the late sixteenth to mid seventeenth centuries. He is primarily known for the discoveries that he made regarding to the way the planets move. These discoveries are typically described in terms of three laws, which are known as the laws of planetary motion. Kepler’s first law states that the orbit of a planet as it travels around the sun is always an ellipse. In other words, the path that a planet takes as it travels around the sun will always resemble a stretched circle and not a round one. Kepler’s second law states that the speed at which a planet travels around the sun will increase as the planet approaches the sun and decrease as it moves farther away from the sun. Kepler’s third law states that an individual can calculate the length of time it takes a planet to travel around the sun if the individual knows the diameter of the planet’s elliptical orbit.

Question 3: List some of the major accomplishments of Galileo Galilei.

Answer 3: Galileo Galilei, who is more commonly known simply as Galileo, was an astronomer and a physicist who lived in Italy during the late sixteenth to mid seventeenth centuries. He is primarily known for the discoveries that he made regarding the way that objects move, the position of the Earth within the solar system, and the position and orbits of the other celestial bodies of the solar system. In fact, Galileo actually discovered four of Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s rings, the black spots that appear on the surface of the sun (which are known as sunspots), the basic concepts that eventually formed Newton’s first law of motion, and a variety of other similar celestial bodies and concepts. However, one of Galileo’s most important discoveries was that the moons of Jupiter actually moved around Jupiter and not the Earth. This was significant because most of the people at the time still believed that all the objects in the universe revolved around the Earth, but Galileo’s discovery proved that there were objects that did not orbit the Earth.

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