One of the things I did actually accomplish over the holidays was to catch up on all my magazines. The one that I had fallen behind on was my science magazine because there are so many good, but lengthy, articles. And it was through one article in the November issue about a new telescope that is going up, currently scheduled for March 5th, that is called the Kepler telescope, that I came upon yesterday's question. This telescope will be used to search for Earth-like planets around other suns. Within this article, it had a small section devoted to the naming of this telescope after the German scientist, Johannes Kepler. (Thanks go to Discover Magazine, November 2008 issue as well as (always) Wikipedia for the extensive information on Kepler.) It is a fitting and honorable name to attribute to this important telescope. And it so happens that the timing is right to honor the real man's birthday as well.
Johannes Kepler was born December 27th, 1571, in a town called Weil der Stadt (very near Stuttgart.) Even as a small child, he could wow adults over his mathematical abilities. In 1577, when he was just 6, a very large comet came into view in the skies over Europe. The natural genius of the child, combined with the astronomical siting, led him down the path of astronomy for the rest of his days.
While studying at the University of Tübingen, he excelled in mathematics. He also had talents for astrology (students, please note, this is not the same as astronomy), which at the time was considered an honorable science and went hand-in-hand with astronomy. When he finished his studies at the university at just 23 years old, he went on to become a teacher at a university in Graz, Austria. While teaching about the movement of the 6 known planets to his students, he realized mathematically how to simulate their motions. Based on his research, he published the first defense of the theories of Copernicus, that the sun was the center of the solar system, not the earth. However, he was not only influenced by math and science. He also often wrote about how this idea of the sun being the center of the solar system (then it was referred to as universe) also reflected in his Lutheran beliefs in the Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). He also had ideas that the earth and the sun had a soul that affected the movements of objects. Of course today, we know this as gravity, but at the time, it was a groundbreaking idea, and it led to his ability to predict lunar eclipses and planetary movements.
Kepler began work with Tycho Brahe, the imperial mathematician (whose main job was to give astrological advice to the emperor), in Poland in 1600. Brahe had an observatory that allowed Kepler to gather more accurate data than he had available to him before. Brahe died suddenly in 1601, which left Kepler as his successor. This opened up many opportunities to Kepler, which he capitalized on. It was during this time that he could devote a significant amount of time to his study of light and how it is affected as well as how the eye perceives light. He also studied the motion of Mars during this time. From this, he completed additional papers in 1604 on optics and also in 1605 on the laws of planetary motion that we still use today. It was also during this time that another fortunate astronomical event happened, the Supernova of 1604 (also known as Kepler's Star), which produced a bright new "star" in the heavens. This allowed him to further the idea that the stars and heavens are not "fixed" as had previously been assumed. In 1611, he published work on the optics of telescopes (thus, the naming of the new telescope that is going up in March bearing his name). His next year was a year of upheaval. His employer, the Emperor Rudolf II, had to abdicate the throne to the emperor's brother, leaving his job as tenuous at best, and his wife and only son both died of illness. He moved his family back to Austria.
The years following these discoveries, he dabbled in many topics, from the symmetry of snowflakes to the chronology of events from Jesus's birth onwards. He assisted in the discussions of changing to the Gregorian calendar in German lands, and he wrote about music harmonics and wine barrel container volumes. It is during this time that he married his second wife and that he wrote his multi-volume textbook on Astronomy and the Copernicus theory, which became his most notable work and affected the astonomical views from then on. He again promoted his ideas that planets move in ellipses, that the planets move at different speeds during their passage around the sun, and that planets further away from the sun take longer to orbit the sun (these are Keplers 3 laws of planetary motion) as well as his ideas on a changing heaven and decreasing gravity with distance. And he introduced the use of physics to astronomy, an idea that took many years for people to embrace, as physics was considered to be philosophy and not science at the time.
Kepler died after an illness in Regensburg, Germany (in Bavaria) on November 15th, 1630. He was attributed with being the "key to the revolution of the sciences" as well as the central figure of the entire Scientific Revolution that has led to where we are today in the field of sciences and mathematics. Isaac Newton was later able to use Kepler's ideas to help derive Newtons laws. He influenced geometry, optics and lenses, the science of the eye, meteorology, physics, astronomy, religion, scientific history, as well as the fields of philosophy, music, and even literature as possibly one of the first science fiction writers. Thus, as you have already deduced, here is the answer to the question of how one German man changed the solar system (if not the universe).
The words for the day are the German words for all the planets: der Merkur (mare coor), der Venus (fay noos), die Erde (air deh), der Mars (mahrz), der Jupiter (yoo pee tare), der Saturn (zah toorn), der Uranus (oo rah noos), der Neptun (nehp toon) and for old timessake, der Pluto (pronounced as we say it).
The question for the day is "Which German made it possible for me to read my magazines?"
Auf Wiedersehen,
Frau Spitzer
