Brahe -> Kepler -> Newton 'factoids'

[Ed Eckel <edeckel@erols.com>]

Zell writes:
>  As for knowing the historical development of Newton's mechanics, I'm far
>  from an expert, so I just did some reading in Feyman's lectures.  Feynman
>  stated that Newton used Kepler's 2nd and 3rd laws to deduce (Feynman's
>  word) the law of gravitation.  If Feynman's reading of history is
>  correct, K's laws, rather than being only an interesting stop in the
>  development of Newton's law of gravitation, were crucial to its
>  development.  That being the case, would it not be useful for students to
>  be shown how Kepler's analyses of Brahe's observations were used by
>  Newton to deduce a physical model.  Moreover, as the logic behind the
>  demonstration would loosely follow Newton's logic in deducing the law of
>  gravitation, would we not preserve the integrity of the experience for
>  the students?

I am interested in seeing a development of this 'history' into a unit
for a current classroom of, say, 10th graders in a first course with no
more than an Algebra 2 background.  Understanding Brahe's observations
might be used to motivate kinematics, computer modeling of the data
might make a nice introduction to developing alternate representations
(what we see in the sky, what lists of numbers tell us, what graphs of
dependent/independent variables tell us, what closed forms tell us, what
color coded representations of data tell us, etc) and follow this with
interpreting and generalizing the resulting "Kepler's Laws" to the
"Newton's Laws".

Can one find Brahe's data online?  And can someone point me toward a
useful history of Kepler/Newton in this regard?

Thanks,

Ed Eckel
edeckel@erols.com