Quotes About Johannes Kepler

Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.

I had the intention of becoming a theologian...but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for 'the heavens declare the glory of God.'

Another pioneer of the scientific revolution, Johannes Kepler, was the first to couch an earnest scientific argument – a representation of the Copernican theory of the solar system – as a visionary fantasy. His Somnium (A Dream, 1634) also includes an ingenious attempt to imagine how life on the moon might have adapted to the long cycle of day and night.

So, Fabricius, I already have this: that the most true path of the planet [Mars] is an ellipse, which Dürer also calls an oval, or certainly so close to an ellipse that the difference is insensible.

There must be some definite cause why, whenever snow begins to fall, its initial formation invariably displays the shape of a six-cornered starlet. For if it happens by chance, why do they not fall just as well with five corners or with seven? . . . Who carved the nucleus, before it fell, into six horns of ice? —From "On the Six-Cornered Snowflake," by Johannes Kepler, 1610

I am much occupied with the investigation of physical causes. My aim in this is to show that the celestial machine is not similar to a divine animated being, but similar to a clock.

The harnessing to a rational pursuit of the immense psychic energies derived from an irrational obsession seems to be another secret of genius, at least of genius of a certain type.

I demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides; that it is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.

It was Johannes Kepler who first noticed the effect when he realized that, contrary to expectations, comet tails always point away from the sun. Kepler correctly surmised that pressure from sunlight creates these tails by blowing dust and ice crystals in comets away from the sun.

But as the seventeenth century wore on, precision observations greatly improved due to the invention of the telescope and an increasingly mature application of mathematics to describe the data, and led a host of astronomers and mathematicians – including Johannes Kepler, Galileo and ultimately Isaac Newton – towards an understanding of the workings of the solar system. This theory is good enough even today to send space probes to the outer planets with absolute precision.

As the writer Arthur Koestler astutely observed, "Johannes Kepler became enamored with the Pythagorean dream, and on this foundation of fantasy, by methods of reasoning equally unsound, built the solid edifice of modern astronomy. It is one of the most astonishing episodes in the history of thought, and an antidote to the pious belief that the Progress of Science is governed by logic.

indeed, Johannes Kepler fell into a state of self-described "sacred frenzy" when he found his laws of planetary motion—because those patterns seemed to be signs of God's handiwork.

Contemporaries only know the authority figures and the loudmouths. And the people born into power. But it takes perspective to know who's carrying the load. Nobody here has a clue who Johannes Kepler is. All they know about Galileo is that he's a teacher who got in trouble with the Inquisition. I doubt anyone's heard of Francis Bacon. Even in Britain, nobody really knows him. He's just a guy with a funny name.

I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth. Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here. [ Epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died ]

And I cherish more than anything else the Analogies, my most trustworthy masters. They know all the secrets of Nature, and they ought to be least neglected in Geometry.