2009-09-20 04:28:51
The beauty of the sphere fascinated Copernicus. “The sphere -wrote- it is the most perfect… the most capacious of figures… where it is not possible to find beginning or end“. He imagined a Solar System in which all the bodies, stars, planets, satellites and comets moved around the Sun following perfect circular orbits. However, when he began to calculate the position of the stars based on his model, he discovered, surprised, that things did not end better than in Ptolemy’s model.To adjust the results to reality, Copernicus had to reintroduce the epicycles (loops in the orbits of the planets) and move the center of the Universe to a point a little far from the Sun.
Despite their shortcomings, Copernicus’s ideas were gaining adherents, including Johannes Kepler, a neurotic, self-loathing, arrogant, and vociferous mathematician, but an extraordinarily perceptive theorist.
Kepler became fond of astronomy during his childhood, when his mother, a poor woman suspected of witchcraft, took him one night to see the great commentary of 1577 and, three years later, to gaze at the reddish face of the eclipsed Moon. He had a difficult childhood, his sour character caused his classmates to beat him up more than once, but, despite everything, he grew up convinced that the world was fundamentally beautiful, just as Plato described in his harmony of worlds.
At the University of Tübingen, Kepler was taught by Michael Mastlin, one of the few Copernican professors at the time. Imbibed by modern ideas, mixed with those of Plato, Kepler decided that his aim in life was “intertwine Copernicus with astronomy and physics recast, so that both perish or both survive.”
There was only one way to prove Copernicus was right, if he had it: with the data provided by astronomical observation. At that time, Tycho Brahe, an eccentric and brilliant astronomer with a prominent belly and a silver nose, had built an impressive observatory from which he observed the sky like no one before. Kepler said of Tycho: “…has the best observations… He only needs an architect who uses all that treasure according to his own scheme.”
Although the relationships were not easy, Kepler worked with the Danish astronomer’s data until, one day in 1601, Tycho died from drinking too much beer during a royal banquet. ” Don’t let it seem like I’ve died in vain“-were his last words.
Observations of Mars were Kepler’s obsession before and after Tycho’s death. Neither Ptolemy nor Copernicus could accurately predict the movement of the Red Planet. He tried again and again, following Copernicus’s fascination with the sphere, he tried to square the data with sixty different circular orbits, to no avail. He attacked the problem from every possible angle. He traveled with his imagination to Mars and tried to reconstruct the path that the Earth would follow as seen from a Martian observatory. He moved his imaginary observation point to the Sun and tried to calculate the movement of Mars from there. Finally, one day light came on in his tireless mind. “I have the answer” -he wrote to his friend Fabricius- “.. the orbit of the planet is a Ellipse perfect.” “I have discovered in the movements of the celestial bodies the full nature of harmony“.
Kepler died on November 15, 1630, at the age of 48. He wrote himself the epitaph for him:
“I measured the skies, and now I measure the shadows.
The spirit was in heaven, the body rests on Earth.”
His grave has been lost, destroyed by the war.
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