Before Kepler, there was speculation. After Kepler, there was knowledge. This 1948 biography of Kepler is full of drama, suffering, delight, insight, victories, defeats, astronomy, philosophy and everything else. I wish I had read this biography a long time ago. This is a non-technical biography in the sense that there is not much detail of the mathematical procedures which Kepler used, but enough information is given for a mathematician or physicist to guess how the calculations must have proceeded.
In my opinion, Kepler's laws were more difficult to discover, and were therefore a more important step, than the work of Newton, which in a sense merely combined the Earthly kinetics of Galileo with the celestial kinetics of Kepler. The egotistical, egocentric egomaniac Galileo could have done what Newton did, but instead decided to champion the archaic notions of the dead Copernicus rather than share credit for anything with the living Kepler. In fact, Kepler did come extremely close to making the missing link between an inverse square law and the elliptical orbits following the equal-area law and the 3/2-power orbital period law. All he needed was the calculus, which was not yet quite adequate for his purposes. Using calculus to combine Earthly kinetics with celestial kinetics was left to Newton, although it was Kepler who did the really difficult part of the overall work.
I was led to this book by Koestler's "
Sleepwalkers
", which makes crystal clear that Galileo was a nobody in astronomy, who actually retarded the progress of astronomy by provoking the pope to ban the Copernican theory, whereas Kepler was the true giant of astronomy. This book by Caspar fills in many of the gaps in Koestler's book, making Kepler's huge contribution clear, whereas Galileo's "
Dialogue
" was pure pompous nonsense. Galileo got almost everything wrong, including the tides, the shapes of planetary orbits and the dynamics of the orbit of the Moon. Since the Copernican theory was little more than a semi-optimized Ptolemaic epicycle theory, Galileo was backing the wrong horse because he actually knew almost nothing about celestial mechanics.
The ending of this book is a mixture of sadness and delight. Kepler suffered so extremely from the events of his life, and yet made such gigantic contributions to human knowledge. His work was the basis of the inevitable synthesis by Newton. So it is extremely sad that events were so cruel to him. But the delight at the end of this book is that his great desire to communicate his knowledge to future centuries was realized. The following, written by Kepler in 1618 while writing "Harmonice Mundi", appears on page 267.
"Now, because eighteen months ago the first dawn, three months ago the broad daylight, but a very few days ago the full sun of a most highly remarkable spectacle has risen, nothing holds me back. Indeed, I give myself up to sacred frenzy. I sneeringly defy mortals by the following public avowal: I have plundered the golden vessels of the Egyptians, in order to furnish a sacred tabernacle for my God out of them far from the borders of Egypt. If you pardon me, I am happy. If you are angry with me, I bear it. Well, then, I cast the die and write a book for the present time, or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred years for its readers, as God also has waited six thousand years for an onlooker."
I think that is the quintessential quotation in this book. Everyone who has an interest in astronomy or life should read it.
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