Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

106 SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS UP TO DESCARTES
But Tycho’s theorizing was of less scientific importance than his practice. He
was unusual among men of science in being of aristocratic birth, and this made
substantial patronage easier to obtain. The King of Denmark granted him the
island of Hveen (situated between Copenhagen and Elsinore), on which he built
a magnificent observatory called Uraniborg. Up to that time it could only have
been rivalled by Islamic or Mongol observatories, such as those at Maragha and
Samarkand. Not only was the hardware, so to speak, superb, but Tycho had it
manned by a group of able assistants whom he at least tried to rule with a rod of
iron. The result was an incomparably accurate collection of observations of
stellar positions, which historically was to play a far more significant role than
his famous demonstrations that the New Star (to us a supernova) of 1572 and the
comet of 1577 were supralunary, and hence symptoms of change in supposedly
immutable regions, and that the latter would have to be passing through the solid
spheres of Aristotelian cosmology. Nevertheless these made important dents in
the old world picture, although ironically Galileo denied the validity of his
arguments with regard to the comet.
There is a waggish yet revealing quip that Tycho’s most important discovery
of all was that of a person, namely Johann Kepler. Kepler was born into a
Lutheran family, and was himself heading for the Lutheran ministry when he
entered the University of Tubingen in 1587. 21 However, his course was deflected
by a growing interest in astronomy, fostered by one of his teachers, Michael
Maestlin, who happened to be one of the few convinced Copernicans of the era,
and in 1594 with Maestlin’s encouragement Kepler accepted the post of District
Mathematician at Graz. His duties involved some elementary mathematical
teaching and the drawing up of astrological prognostications, but he also pursued
his own theoretical interests in astronomy, and in 1596 published a small book
entitled Mysterium Cosmographicum. It could be tempting to pass this book over
as merely ‘quaint’ were it not for Kepler’s much later claim that,
Just as if it had been literally dictated to me, an oracle fallen from heaven,
all the principal chapters of the published booklet were immediately
recognised as most true by the discerning (which is the wont of God’s
manifest works), and have these twenty-five years carried before me more
than a single torch in accomplishing the design (initiated by the most
celebrated astronomer Tycho Brahe of the Danish nobility) of the
restoration of astronomy, and, moreover, almost anything of the books of
astronomy that I have produced since that time could be referred to one or
other of the chapters set forth in this booklet, of which it would contain
either an illustration or a completion. 22
And an attentive reading shows that much of this was indeed the case.
In the book Kepler reveals himself as one who would out-Copernicize
Copernicus in his belief in the physical reality of a heliocentric system, and this
attitude is reinforced by a commitment to asking why, and answering it in terms