Kepler and Brahe

When Johannes Kepler went to work for the astronomer Tycho Brahe, he found himself in the midst of a strange set of circumstances. Brahe lived in a castle on an island, and there he conducted his painstakingly careful observations. Brahe had a dwarf who scrambled for food in the dining hall. Brahe also had a silver nose that replaced the natural nose he had lost in a duel. Kepler was given the problem of computing the orbit of Mars, and he wrote in one of his letters that Brahe fed him data in little bits, just as the dwarf received crumbs under the table.

Kepler had come to Brahe because of the observations. He was hungry for the observations. Without them, the principles of planetary motion – the patterns he discovered – would never have been discovered. Without these patterns, Newton's explanation – the universal theory of gravitation – would never have emerged.

We need to observe, and we need to do it very well, with imagination, with boldness, and with dedication. If we do not observe, we shall never see what is there. If we never see what is there, we shall never see the patterns in what is there. Without the patterns, there will never be the kind of theory that we can build with.

Observing and discovering pattern is what this book is about. We do this kind of thing for a living, and we have chosen to do it because it is what we think science is about.