Word: tycho
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This play is an intellectual hybrid of philosophy of knowledge, science and history. Tycho Brahe has an omnipotent historical perspective. Johnannes Kepler's parents speak to each other through scientific texts for the entire play. Sounds like the story was written by a Harvard undergraduate, doesn't it? Guaranteed to be better than A World Without History, the first play by Kornhaber, who is also a Crimson editor, this production actually sounds hot. With what's purported to be a great ensemble cast this could be the best thing since Galileo or Picasso at the Lapin Agille...
...hours reading. The imaginary world she creates around herself is rich with the images and characters of her favorite stories--not "fantasy" tales, but ancient epics of sailors, travelers and explorers, from Odysseus and Marco Polo to Horatio Hornblower and that island-bound explorer of the sky, Tycho Brahe. The towering absence of Saskia's barely-remembered father, a Danish sailor named Thomas, fills her imagination with images of captains, the sea and Northern lands; the towering presence of her beautiful and world-wise best friend, Jane Singh, fills her dreams with images of willowy, "dusky maidens" welcoming Saskia...
Scientists, meanwhile, were demystifying the universe. Strangely, no one knows for sure who invented the telescope, but by 1609 Galileo Galilei had built one of his own. With it he was able to confirm the heretical speculations of Copernicus, Kepler and Tycho Brahe that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe. The specific origins of the microscope are equally obscure. In the 17th century, Robert Hooke used it to describe accurately the anatomy of a flea and the design of a feather; Antonie de Leeuwenhoek discovered a world of wriggling organisms in a drop of water...
Europeans left no known record of the Crab supernova, although some probably saw it, and no evidence has been found that they saw an 1181 stellar explosion. It was not until November 1572 that Europe joined the fraternity of distinguished supernova recorders. Although Danish Astronomer Tycho Brahe was not the first to spot the new star that appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia, he ensured that posterity would associate his name with it by writing a book titled De Nova Stella (Concerning the New Star...
...Middle Ages, Copernicus displaced earth from its position at the center of the solar system. But Aristotle's thinking continued to dominate astronomy until 1572, when Tycho Brahe observed a bright new star (which scientists now know was a supernova, or exploding star) near the constellation Cassiopeia. Beyond any doubt, it had not previously been visible. Other blows to Aristotelian cosmology followed swiftly. By early in the 17th century, Galileo had used his telescope to discover spots on the sun−demonstrating that the solar complexion was somewhat less than perfect−and to prove that...