Johannes Kepler - a 17th-century astronomer cover art

Johannes Kepler - a 17th-century astronomer

Johannes Kepler - a 17th-century astronomer

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You’re listening to “Scientific Giants Who Changed Our Understanding of the World We Live In.” Each episode stands beside one mind and follows a thread of curiosity until it ties to the world we inhabit. Today we sit at a wooden table strewn with triangles and circles, where a restless mathematician rubs his eyes and returns to an obstinate set of numbers that refuse to lie nicely. Outside the window a Central European winter gnaws at roofs and horses; inside, a lamp burns over parchment copied and recopied, measurements bled from a decade of cold nights, error bars smudged where fingers hovered too long. The mind at this table loves harmony more than argument, elegance more than compromise, and yet will spend years betraying its favorite ideas in order to be faithful to the world. He is Johannes Kepler: poor, pious, brilliant, nearsighted, fierce; a court mathematician and an exile, a defender of his mother in a witchcraft trial and the inventor of a telescope design, a writer of textbooks and of a book called New Astronomy that made planets obey curves no philosopher had wanted them to follow.

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