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Kepler had died thirteen years before, and there remained no astronomer in the field who is conspicuous in the history of science as a champion of the Copernican doctrine. But in truth it might be said that the theory no longer needed a champion. The researches of Kepler and Galileo had produced a mass of evidence for the Copernican theory which amounted to demonstration.
His daughter, Susanna, the wife of Jacob Bartsch, a physician who had helped Kepler with his Ephemeris, lost her husband soon after her father's death, and succeeded in obtaining part of Kepler's arrears of salary by threatening to keep Tycho's manuscripts, but her stepmother was left almost penniless with five young children.
It never rose much above the fourth magnitude, but it showed a peculiar spectrum containing both bright and dark lines of hydrogen. But a bewildering surprise was now in store; the world was to behold at the opening of the twentieth century such a celestial spectacle as had not been on view since the times of Tycho and Kepler. Before daylight on the morning of February 22, 1901, the Rev.
When Kepler had before him that wonderful series of observations of the planet, Mars, which had been accumulated by the extraordinary skill of Tycho, he proved, after much labour, that the movements of the planet refused to be represented in a circular form. Nor would it do to suppose that Mars revolved in one circle, the centre of which revolved in another circle.
It must be understood, too, that the earth is constantly regarded, in accordance with the Copernican system, as being itself a member of the planetary system, subject to precisely the same laws as the other planets. Long familiarity has made these wonderful laws of Kepler seem such a matter of course that it is difficult now to appreciate them at their full value.
An historical statement will supply it. In the year 1631, the illustrious Galileo, as appears from his Dialogues, was so far from perceiving the mathematical relations from which Laplace deduced results so beautiful, so unequivocal, and so useful, that he taxed with frivolousness the vague idea which Kepler entertained of attributing to the moon's attraction a certain share in the production of the diurnal and periodical movements of the waters of the ocean.
To this Tycho objected, and Kepler had great difficulty in convincing him that the new move would be any improvement, but undertook to prove to him by actual examples that a false position of the orbit could by adjusting the equant be made to fit the longitudes within five minutes of arc, while giving quite erroneous values of the latitudes and second inequalities.
The years of Kepler's middle life were sorely distracted by a trouble which, though not uncommon in those days, is one which we find it difficult to realise at the present time. His mother, Catherine Kepler, had attained undesirable notoriety by the suspicion that she was guilty of witchcraft.
It is surprising to hear Tycho credited with so startling a theory, but, on the other hand, such an explanation is precisely what should be expected from the other astronomer named. For Johann Kepler, or, as he was originally named, Johann von Kappel, was one of the most speculative astronomers of any age.
His guiding stars are rather the great mathematicians of the Continent, Kepler and Galileo, while Cartesian influences also are not to be denied. He finds his mission in the construction of a strictly mechanical view of the world.
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