johannes kepler-imperial mathematician, murder suspect, harbinger of the industrial revolution.

Aristotle had done ancient and medieval astronomers a considerable service by drawing a line between physics and the mathematical sciences, including astronomy, in a way that could be interpreted to mean that astronomers need not search for Aristotelian “causes” for celestial motions. By Ptolemy’s day, it had become routine to invent devices such as the epicycle and equant that yielded reliable predictions, without any need to explain what might cause the planets to move in the manner prescribed by those devices. In fact, to declare that Ptolemy either did or did not think the planets literally move in the way these mechanisms had them moving would be to misunderstand him. In the absence of any remote chance of conclusive direct evidence one way or the other, there was much to be said for not belaboring that question–maybe for not even realizing the possibility of such a question. A man who worried about whether his mathematical system represented literal reality was an exception. This was not an intellectual situation confined to the ancients. A similar mind-set exists today at the leading edge of theoretical physics. (Kitty Ferguson, Tycho and Kepler)

Ptolemy couldn’t get his geocentric model to work right with his observations of the skies. Why did some planets appear to move backwards sometimes? Why do planets change their speeds? He scratched his head and went to work fudging the equations to make it work, because it simply had to work. There wasn’t any other viable option (nevermind that pesky Aristarchus…crazy sun centered fool!).

But Kepler knew better. Kepler was a Copernican. He knew that the earth was just another planet warlbling her way along some invisible path around the sun. What Kepler meant to figure out was how to work the math that really and truly described what was happening in the sky, not just fudged numbers.

Was Kepler a crazy maniacal bulldog who hated Brahe’s fame/weath/success and ultimately poisoned Brahe with mercury in order to steal his observations? Or was Kepler a mild mannered–if perhaps slightly abrasive–fellow, who waited patiently for old Brahe to decide to hand over the observations, coincidentally dying a few short days later? I’m afraid we shall never know. What we do know is that Kepler obsessed and guessed and checked  and took long walks and stayed up all night and made tables and pictures and wrote chapters and ignored his wife for years and years, whittling away at his theories, before finally solving Ptolemy’s problem of planets that go backward and change speeds. (I won’t try to rehash all that math gnashing for you. If you’re interested, there’s a great math gnash rehash here). I’ll just give you the short skinny:

Kepler ultimately discovered that planets travel in ellipses rather than in circles. They speed up when they are closer to the sun, because of the sun’s gravitational pull. Because the planets don’t travel at the same speeds, some planets may “lap” each other, so to speak, which causes Ptolemy’s problem of planets that appear to be moving backwards.

(NASA SP-4212)

That may sound rather anticlimactic but please rest assured this seemingly simple deduction was perfectly outrageous in the early 1600’s (even Copernicus had his planets traveling in perfect little o’s). Kepler’s discovery reformed all of astronomy, eventually leading to the formation of the laws of planetary motion. These laws, along with Newton’s mathematical theories, gave rise to a new generation of modern astronomy and physics.

From the time Kepler first began working with Tycho’s data at Benatky, he chose to let the tight constraints of mathematical/geometrical logic and precise observations be his primary guides and to give them, for a while, precedence over the [ancient Greek] ideas of symmetry and harmony. Kepler was setting a precedence still followed in science, where symmetry, harmony and logical beauty are not the most important criteria for judging whether a theory is correct. (Kitty Ferguson, Tycho and Kepler)

ps. Kepler really was the Imperial Mathematician for Rudolph II. One of his jobs was to do astrological readings for the Royalty.

pps. His mom was arrested and taken to jail when she was 74 years old, accused of being a witch by some meddling neighbors. Kepler and his lawyer wrote up a 126 page legal brief to try and get her acquitted, but it was his mother’s own verbal defense in the presence of a bailiff and a torturer which ultimately saved her. The neighbors were charged 10 florins (about a dollar and a half) for the false report.

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kitties, mooses, noses and dwarves-astronomers are people-pt III

The last two astronomers I’m going to expound upon have a book written about them entitled Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership that Forever Changed our Understanding of the Heavens. It’s written by a woman named Kitty Ferguson. (I love that name…Kitty Ferguson…what a terrific marriage of whimsy and pragmatism!) Usually I find historical non-fiction books a bit dry, but this one was rather a good read. I think it might be the first book of it’s type that I read all the way through and mostly in order. Usually I get bored and skip around a lot, which sometimes leads to eventual completion and other times to confusion and abandonment.

Anyway.  Tycho (pronounced like Tee-ko or more accurately Tÿcho, which was a Latinized version of his given name Tyge) Brahe and Johannes Kepler were unlikely candidates for “The Partnership that Forever Changed the Way We View the Heavens.” Here’s a little breakdown of what I’ve learned from Kitty Ferguson (I’ll do Tycho first, he was older):

Tycho Brahe was born in Denmark in 1546, into a family of great wealth. When he was two years old, his aunt and uncle (his father’s brother) kidnapped him from his parent’s castle and took him to their own castle a few hours away. Apparently his parents didn’t mind so very much that he was stolen from them. His father Otte did threaten to murder his brother if Tycho wasn’t returned, but they never made any attempt to retrieve him. This may have had to do with the fact that Otte’s wife Beate gave birth to eleven children and Jørgen and Inger, the aunt and uncle, had none, save young Tycho.

The kidnapping turned out to be a boon for Tycho, because his aunt Inger’s family were scholors, while the Brahe’s were militiamen. Otte felt that there was no need to study Latin, while Inger’s family made certain that Tycho had the best education available at the time. (One of Inger’s closest friends was Princess Anne of Denmark, one of the few recorded female alchemists.) Tycho grew up to be very suave and confident as he mingled with royalty. He understood etiquette and custom to a fine, fine point. His style and flair at kingly court was matched only by his exacting methodology and mathematical genius. Jørgen wanted Tycho to become a lawyer but Tycho wanted only to study the stars, which he did secretly, unbeknownst to the “preceptor” (sort of like a mild spy/nanny) that Jørgen hired to attend University of Copenhagen with fifteen-year-old Tycho.

Eventually Jørgen died and Tycho was able to study the skies out of the closet, so to speak. (He was still hampered by the fact that noblemen were not supposed to lower themselves to such petty careers as scientists, but he was able to find ways to buck that system as he grew older more savvy to the politics of the day.) Shortly after his foster father’s death, Tycho had an argument with a cousin over which man was the better mathematician. The quarrel came to blows and a portion of Tycho’s nose was severed. It took him a full season to heal from the wound, but in this time his lifelong interest in medicinal alchemy was set. Tycho had a two new noses sculpted from metal–one of lightweight copper for everyday use, and another of gold and silver mixed together (fleshtone) for special occasions. He attached the nose to his face with special adhesive salve.

Tycho eventually became the premier astronomer in Europe during a time of great observation and theory making. Tycho rejected Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, although he knew things weren’t so simple as Ptolemy made them out to be. Tycho tried to have his cake and eat it too, coming up with the geo-heliocentric model: the Moon and the Sun revolve around the Earth, everything else revolves around the Sun.

Not surprisingly, it was Tycho’s astronomical observations and the instruments he invented and built to make them (along with his political schmoozing) and not fabulous attempt at a new cosmological theory that made him famous. Tycho built three huge observatories in his life, Uraniborg and Stjerneborg on the island of Hven in Denmark and another outside Prague later in his life. He spent forty years attempting to make the world’s most accurate empirical measurements of the stars, planets, and comets.

Interesting Brahe-ian tidbits:

Wikipedia says that Tycho kept a clairvoyant dwarf and a court jester at his lavish observatory on the Danish island Hven. He also had a beloved tame moose-like animal, which got into the beer hold one evening, became intoxicated and died falling down the stairs of the castle. This marked the beginning of a very sad time in Tycho’s life.

Tycho was incredibly secretive of his observational records, preferring to keep them to himself and a very close assistants, rather than publish them. He was fearful that other would-be astronomers would steal his ideas, which they often ended up doing anyway.

Tycho Brahe published several books (some from his personal printing press at Hven) despite the fact that noblemen weren’t supposed to stoop to such lowly scholarly activities.

Tycho tutored a young, upstart Protestant mathematician named Johannes Kepler who was fleeing a spirituality torn Germany. Tycho was suspicious that Kepler was a spy for many, many months and refused to show Kepler his life’s work of observations until a few days prior to his death.

Tycho died of either a.) a burst bladder brought on by the fact that he wouldn’t get up to urinate during a royal dinner (it wasn’t polite) or b.) he was poisoned with mercury by an unknown murderer.

More on Johannes Kepler next time around…

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