Johannes Kepler dedicated much of his work to discover a law for the refraction of light. Unfortunately, he formulated an incorrect law. Nevertheless, it was useful for anticipating the behavior of light in some specific conditions. Some believe that Kepler did not have the elements to formulate the law that was later accepted by the scientific community, that is, the Snell–Descartes law. However, in this paper, we propose a model that agrees with Kepler’s heuristics and that is also successful in anticipating the behavior of light when it passes through a surface that separates two media with different optical densities. This model adopts strategies that were recommended by Kepler in two types of analogies. The obstacles that led to the failure of the two types of analogies are presented in the article, and we argue that the model proposed here could overcome these specific obstacles. Finally, we show how the proposed model could be articulated with Kepler’s metaphysics of light.

中文翻译：

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折射定律和开普勒启发式

约翰内斯·开普勒 (Johannes Kepler) 的大部分工作都致力于发现光的折射定律。不幸的是，他制定了不正确的法律。然而，它对于预测某些特定条件下的光行为很有用。有些人认为开普勒不具备制定后来被科学界接受的定律，即斯内尔-笛卡尔定律的要素。然而，在本文中，我们提出了一个模型，该模型与开普勒的启发式算法一致，并且在预测光穿过将具有不同光密度的两种介质分开的表面时也成功地预测了光的行为。该模型采用了开普勒在两种类比中推荐的策略。导致这两种类比失败的障碍在文章中提出，我们认为这里提出的模型可以克服这些特定的障碍。最后，我们展示了如何将所提出的模型与开普勒的光形而上学联系起来。