Johannes Kepler

Jesus, there's more.

[laughs] He had an apprentice called Johannes Kepler.

Very famous, very famous astronomer in his own right.

Okay? Brilliant guy.

That he rejected the Copernican theory with scorn is an exaggeration, but he never accepted it, notwithstanding arguments that the best astronomers of his time found convincing, and the longer he lived, the more unfavourable became his opinion of its merits.

And it is certain that Tycho Brahe's wonderful mass of observations with the splendid generalizations based on them by Kepler are never mentioned in his writings.

Now, what really ruined Aristotelianism was the heliocentric astronomy, as Bruno perfectly saw.

And ignorance of this left Bacon after all in the bonds of medieval philosophy.

thus his prodigious powers would have been much more usefully devoted to moral philosophy as it is the essays alone remain to show what great things he might have done by limiting himself to the subjects with which they deal the famous logical and physical treatises the novum organum and the de augmentis notwithstanding their wealth and splendour of language are to us at the present day less living than the fragments of early greek thought than most of plato than much of aristotle than atomism as expounded by lucretius macaulay rests his claim of the highest place among philosophers for bacon not on his inductive theory to which the historian rightly denies any novelty but on the new purpose and direction that the search for knowledge is assumed to have received from his teaching on this view the whole of modern science has been created by the desire to convert nature into an instrument for the satisfaction of human wants an ambition dating from the publication of the noam organum the claim will not stand for two reasons The first is that the great movement of modern science began at least half a century before Bacon's birth, growing rapidly during his life, but without his knowledge, and continuing its course without being perceptibly accelerated by his intervention ever since.

The one man of science who most commonly passes for his disciple is Robert Boyle, 1627-1691. but boyle did not read the noam organum before he was thirty whereas residing at florence before fifteen he received a powerful stimulus from the study of galileo and his chemistry was based on the atomic theory which bacon rejected the second reason for not accepting macaulay's claim is that in modern europe no less than in ancient greece the great advances in science have only been made by those who loved knowledge for its own sake or if the expression be preferred simply for the gratification of their intellectual curiosity No doubt their discoveries have added enormously to the utilities of life, but such advantages have been gained on the sole condition of not making them the primary end in view.

The labours of Bacon's own contemporaries, Kepler and Gilbert, have led to the navigation of the sea by lunar distances, and to the various industrial applications of electromagnetism, but they were undertaken without a dream of these remote results and in our own day the greatest of scientific triumphs which is the theory of evolution was neither worked out with any hope of material benefits to mankind nor has it offered any prospect of them as yet the same may be said of modern sidereal astronomy from the humanist point of view it would not be easy to justify the enormous expenditure of energy money and time that this science has absorbed the schoolmen have been much ridiculed for discussing the question how many angels could dance on the point of a needle but as a purely speculative problem it surely merits as much attention as the total number of the stars the rates of their velocities or the law of their distribution through space a schoolman might even have urged in justification of his curiosity that some of us might feel a reasonable curiosity about the exact size if size they have of beings with whom we hope to associate one day whereas by the confession of the astronomers themselves neither we nor our descendants can ever hope to verify by direct measurement the precarious guesses of their science in this branch of celestial statics and dynamics section two section three of history of modern philosophy by alfred william ben this librivox recording is in the public domain chapter i the philosophical renaissance part three thomas hobbes It has been shown that one momentous effect of the Copernican astronomy as interpreted by Giordano Bruno was to reverse the relative importance ascribed in Aristotle's philosophy to the two great categories of power and act, giving to power a value and dignity of which it had been stripped by the judgment of Plato and Aristotle.

Even Epicurus, when he rehabilitated infinite space, had been careful as a moralist to urge the expediency of placing a close limitation on human desires, denouncing the excesses of avarice and ambition more mildly, but not less decisively than the contemporary Stoic school.

It was Copernicus that revitalized the idea that the earth orbits the sun, what we call the heliocentric solar system.

In the early 1600s, the creation scientist Johannes Kepler discovered the true nature of the orbits of the planets.

Using data recorded by Tycho Brahe, Kepler found that planets orbit the sun in ellipses, not perfect circles as had been previously thought.

Consequently, a planet is slightly closer to the sun at times and slightly farther at other times.

Furthermore, Kepler discovered the precise mathematical details by which a planet speeds up when closer to the Sun and slows down when farther away in its orbit.

Kepler also found the exact mathematical relationship between a planet's orbital period and its average distance from the Sun.

Namely, the period squared is proportional to the distance cubed.

These mathematical discoveries allowed astronomers to refine their calculations of the positions of the planets with much higher precision and accuracy than had been possible in the past.

In Europe, the question surfaced much later.

In 1611, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote a short essay called The Six-Cornered Snowflake, in which he wondered why snow crystals always have six sides.

He wrote it as a New Year's gift for a patron, and it is a playful piece, but the question at its center was a serious one.

He compared snowflakes to honeycombs and to stacked spheres, circling the problem from several sides.

Kepler could not explain the hexagonal symmetry with the science available to him, and he said so plainly.

But his question anticipated the field of crystallography by more than two centuries.

His thoughts about how small round particles might pack together were remarkably close to the modern idea of atoms arranged in a lattice.

The complexity of snow as a material continues to reveal new discoveries, including recent findings about how snow crystals can conduct heat and how the microstructure of the snowpack evolves over time.

As we just mentioned, Isaac Newton, that was one.

And in addition to that, how about Johannes Kepler? Kepler was a person very faithful to scientific evidence, even when it challenged his own beliefs.

Look it up for yourself.

One day he was teaching a geometry class, and while he was drawing a very simple diagram, it suddenly hit him.

And this is not merely by chance.

This is actually God answering my years of prayers.

That is from Johannes Kepler.

Earlier, I mentioned Isaac Newton.

Yes.

Johannes Kepler himself complained bitterly that the great Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in 1563 occurred a full month later than the traditional tables predicted.

That's a massive margin of error.

On top of that, they had no capacity for empirical testing, no double-blind studies, no statistical analysis to verify if every man with Venus opposite Saturn was actually hated by his wife.

Keep this to yourself.

Can you do something, like, useful? Give me the temperature! Oh my God, I'm getting it! Okay, it's a little hot, but it doesn't even get close to the other Keplers.

I look at you, Kepler-10b, 69c, or any other.

Damn, it was me who named them.