Word: kepler
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...Habsburg emperor, Rudolf II was exceptionally inept. During his rule, from 1576 to 1612, he was forced to cede Hungary, Moravia, Austria and Bohemia. Yet he had vision of sorts. He was an amateur astronomer, brought Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe to the Hradčany, his imperial castle in Prague, to perfect his stargazing. Rudolf's keen eye carried over into the arts, which he collected with all the magpiety of a Renaissance nobleman worshiping beauty. It was one of the world's greatest collections, but Rudolf could not hold on to it either...
...further observation shows that the working hypothesis is faulty, it is replaced by another which seems more nearly correct. "Fortunately, scientific endeavor does not have to be perfect to yield results. The magnificent structure of dynamics was based on a differential calculus that was, logically, full of holes." Kepler's laws explaining planetary motion were based on calculations now shown to be mere approximations. Even the Euclidean underpinnings of Newton's iron law of gravitation have become only one of the possible systems of geometry...
...Even Kepler, Pingree pointed out, made most of his living by making astrological predictions. But the 18th century, with the growth of science, particularly of astronomy, brought an end to horoscopic fortune-telling...
Holton plans to study unpublished and little known works of the seventeenth century astronomer and physicist Johannes Kepler. Housed in the archives of the University of Leningrad, the manuscripts were bought by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, during...
...from Shakespeare to Descartes. It was a time when superstition was rampant; a king's touch would cure scrofula, corpses bled in the presence of the murderer, comets signified disaster-although Galileo was calmly regarding the heavens through a telescope that magnified 1,000 times. Witchcraft (in which Kepler believed) was widespread: the Archbishop of Trier found it necessary to burn 120 of his fellow Germans on the ground that they had prolonged the cold weather long past the change of seasons. And yet the voice that defined the age and spoke one of its most famous lines belongs...