Johannes Kepler was born the year before Tycho’s famous nova blared in the heavens. Quite the opposite of the noble birth of the flamboyant Dane, Kepler was born to a poor, dysfunctional family. His father deserted when he was a young child and several of his relatives were mentally disturbed. Kepler was a sickly child who sought solitude in his studies. He may have become just another wasted mind, had not the Lutheran duke of the region, wanting to challenge the superior position of the Catholic Church, funded full scholarships to promising young Lutheran scholars.
Young Johannes escaped the poverty of his origins and received a fine education—aimed at becoming a Lutheran clergyman. That suited his disposition, he felt, and spoke to his pious devotion to his God. His clerical game plan got derailed, however, when he was assigned to go teach math in a school in the outlying region of Austria. He regarded the move as banishment to the hinterlands and the end of his clerical plans, but he dutifully went.
Kepler had an innate mathematics skill and a budding interest in astronomy. His teaching job—not very demanding of his time, since he was not a good teacher and was avoided by students—allowed him to begin to dabble in astronomy. He also possessed the necessary astrological skills of a good astronomer of the day, and made a couple of fortunate predictions—based more on an astute observation of current events than the stars. His reputation grew.
One day, while lecturing in a rote manner to his bored math students about geometrical shapes, Kepler had what seemed to him a mystical insight into the motions of the planets. They revolved around the sun (he was already sure) and their distances from the sun must follow the simple mathematical relationships of geometric solids like spheres, cubes, pyramids, etc. His insight expanded further, telling him that the orbits were also related to each other in the manner of musical harmonic intervals. It was all so elegant! He spent the next few decades avidly pursuing these ideas—all erroneous, but it led him ever more deeply into astronomical studies.
His pursuit of his fantasy led him to ask new and bold questions, while his mathematical prowess and dogged determination kept him on the path. It gradually corrected his errors and pointed him in the right direction. He began to develop new (and correct) ideas about the paths of planets. Maybe they are ellipses and not circles? He came very close to describing the effects of the sun’s gravity on planetary motion, but gravity was something for Galileo and Newton to explain later.
Kepler needed accurate observational data to verify his conceptual models. He drew ever closer to discovering and latching onto Tycho’s observational treasure. Through an extremely unlikely set of events, both Tycho and Kepler became exiles from their homelands. This led later to both of them becoming honored subjects of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph, who reigned in Prague.
United at last, the two of them wrestled disagreeably back and forth for a couple of years. Then Tycho died of his pee poisoning. Kepler inherited Tycho’s voluminous works and over the next 30 years dove into his theoretical studies. More and more he began to ask “why.” It led him into new territory: he began to seek physical causes, rather than just good descriptions of planetary motions.
This path eventually led him to discover his three laws of planetary motion—which for the first time put astronomy on a sound and simple mathematical foundation. Without these laws and their mechanistic insights, Newton wouldn’t have been able a few years later to formulate his laws of universal gravity, as well as the role of forces and momentum, in determining the motion of the planets and all stellar bodies.
Next time: Was this partnership a coincidence or was it destined to have happened?
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