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Updated: May 13, 2025
While the shores of the Baltic became famed for the studies of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler, those of the Mediterranean were celebrated for giving birth to men of genius in all its variety, and for having abounded with poets and historians, as well as with men of science.
He encouraged him with hopes that the arrears of his salary would be paid from Saxony; but these hopes were fallacious, and it was not till the death of Rudolph, in 1612, that Kepler was freed from these distressing embarrassments. On the accession of Mathias, Rudolph's brother, Kepler was re-appointed imperial mathematician, and was allowed to accept the professorship at Linz.
Some of his pupils had remained in his house more than twenty years; and in the quarrel which arose between him and Kepler, and which is allowed to have originated entirely in the temper of the latter, he conducted himself with the greatest patience and forbearance.
The only reason why Professor Fleming says that the atoms "have to be guided into certain positions to build up the complex molecules" is that he is unable to isolate this assumed directive force and to show it in operation; he is like a modern Kepler faced with something the cause of which he doesn't know, and lugging in "God" to save further trouble.
Nevertheless, Kepler, the third member of the trio, could not have made his most valuable discoveries without Tycho's observations. This uncle brought him up as his own son, provided him at the age of seven with a tutor, and sent him in 1559 to the University of Copenhagen, to study for a political career by taking courses in rhetoric and philosophy.
For what did Kepler endure the last straits of poverty, his children crying for bread, while his own heart was pierced with their wailing? For the privilege in his own noble words "of reading God's thoughts after Him," God's thoughts written in stellar signs on the scroll of the skies.
The subject is even more amusing in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century, because Galileo and Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, and Isaac Newton took vast pains to fix the laws of acceleration for moving bodies, while Lord Bacon and William Harvey were content with showing experimentally the fact of acceleration in knowledge; but from their combined results a historian might be tempted to maintain a similar rate of movement back to 1600, subject to correction from the historians of mathematics.
Thus the reply to this objection is, first, that there is going on from both sides a narrowing of the chasm supposed to be impassable; and, secondly, that, even were the chasm not in course of being filled up, we should no more be justified in therefore assuming a supernatural commencement of life, than Kepler was justified in assuming that there were guiding-spirits to keep the planets in their orbits, because he could not see how else they were to be kept in their orbits.
Just three centuries ago, Kepler drew a forecast of what he called a "physical astronomy" a science treating of the efficient causes of planetary motion, and holding the "key to the inner astronomy." What Kepler dreamed of and groped after, Newton realized.
His object was to find out if any of them really travelled in elongated ellipses, practically undistinguishable, in the visible part of their paths, from parabolae, in which case they would be seen more than once. He found two old comets whose orbits, in shape and position, resembled the orbit of a comet observed by himself in 1682. Apian observed one in 1531; Kepler the other in 1607.
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