Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens

by Kitty Ferguson

Book Overview

On his deathbed in 1601, the Danish nobleman and greatest naked-eye astronomer, Tycho Brahe, begged his young colleague, Johannes Kepler, "Let me not seem to have lived in vain." For more than thirty... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802713904
• ISBN13: 9780802713902
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Walker Books
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.9" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful book on a fascinating pair of scientists

Although I knew the general outlines of the story of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, this book really fills in the fascinating story of these two great astronomers, who filled the gap between Copernicus and Newton, in moving Astronomy from vague assumptions and imprecise measurements, with complex, arbitrary and ill-fitting models, to a simpler, precise and accurate theory, which survived into the 20th century. Even Einstein's radical theory leads to only minute variations in the predicted behavior of the solar system from Kepler's laws, based on Brahe's observations, and Newton's tie in to gravitation. A great read.

Two Biographies for the Price of One!

Johannes Kepler, early in his career, served as assistant to the famous and prominent Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe during the final 18 months of his life and labors. This is the story of the young mathematician and the aging astronomer, and the tensions in their brief relationship, as well as what came before and after their collaboration. The "housedog" reference in the title comes from Kepler himself. It is how he describes himself, a commoner from a family of modest means, in the early days of his partnership with the nobleman Brahe. The detail the author provides in the individual histories of the two - Kepler and Brahe - and in the circumstances of their meeting and subsequent collaboration is impressive. This is the British edition of this biography of two of the greatest of the Rennaisance astronomers. The book is published in the US as "Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens" with a more attractive cover and internal design. Students and enthusiasts of the histories of the sciences will find either edition of this book both entertaining and enlightening. K. Ferguson is an outstanding biographer, and writes in a surprisingly entertaining and easily readable style.

A really good book

What an appaling title! It is difficlt to imagine how anybody could create enthusiasm about a book about Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. I bought this book at a used book store as a curiosity and it sat on one of my bookshelves for the last few months. The title has no impact but I had glimpsed something about its contents. Nothing about the external covering of this book or the way in which the internal illustrations or plates are presented illuminates how good the book really is. It has an overall drabness about it that I can only attribute to the publisher. The subject matter is hardly riveting and I have ignored the book for some time because I expected it to be drab. What a mistake! Ms Ferguson has a writing style that makes reading a story about 16th century astronomers and mathematicians run like a detective novel. I loved this book! I give it five stars but even though I think the presentation is lack lustre and the fact that her explanations of Kepler's work are not too clear. The diagrams relating to Kepler's work are poor and you really have to have some other understanding of his work to understand why Kepler is important to modern understanding of the universe. This criticism aside, I think Ms Ferguson does a magnificent job of portraying the lives of both Tycho (pronounced Teeko - thank you for this) Brahe and Kepler in a way that makes them appear human. These are names I have known almost my entire adult life but it takes a work like this to make them human. I did find a bias towards Brahe but I don't think there is anything wrong with that. I would have to read her other works to see if she has some kind of bias to nobility (I jest). I can best describe this book as a 'rare treasure'. It really is the kind of book that you can curl up by a fire on a cold night and read from cover to cover. I am a scientist and I love reading books about the history of science but rarely have I found such a well written and engrosing book as this. I give it 5 stars even with the lack-lustre (I originally wrote poor - but that would be unfare) presentation. This is not to say the way that chapter structres are not good - they really are. I think Ms Ferguson has done a great job, Its just that the final presentation is a little dowdy. It has to be asked "why would anybody write about such an obscure subject?" and "why would anybody read it?" I can answer these questions with the simple statement that reading this book leaves one a much richer person. I will certainly be looking for some other books by Ms Ferguson - I hope they are as good. Originally, I gave this book 4 stars because of the presentation but, picking it up again, I realise how much I really enjoyed reading it. The mark of a good book is when you wish you hadn't reached the end. This is a book I wish I had never finished.

Tycho & Kepler - a gooooood read

Tycho & Kepler - The Unlikely Friendship that Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens is, for the most part, an excellent novel and easy read. Although it is a little confusing and dry at the times when complex astronomical concepts are being explained, they are outweighed by the wealth of historical accounts and gratuitous, but juicy tidbits. For instance, besides explaining the extensive instruments that Tycho built, Ferguson offers that he was also the first Dane to write a poem in Latin, that he had a twin that died at birth, and his aunt and uncle kidnapped him from his parents who wanted a girl and didn't much care. As for Kepler, not only did he develop the Harmonic theory, but had a miserable marriage, a mother accused and tried for witchcraft, and was the first author of a science fiction novel. Kitty Ferguson thus tells the life stories of the astronomers Tycho and Kepler in an informative, educational, yet narrative and interesting way. She effectively spans the 20-year gap between Tycho and Kepler by beginning the book describing Tycho's childhood and indeed his life exclusively up until the advent of a comet on December 27, 1571. Ferguson explains that, when Tycho saw the comet, he was out at one of his 60 manmade fish ponds on his estate at the Danish Isle of Hven, catching fish for dinner that evening. Meanwhile Kepler saw the same comet, but he was only five, and it was during a rare warm moment that he shared with his mother on a hilltop in Leonberg. Thus Kepler enters the story. For the rest of the book, Ferguson fluidly integrates the two men's lives, switching back and forth in an understandable, connected way. She eventually merges the two stories in a dynamic, functional manner, and shows how they used each other, and that many of their final results were synthesized versions of their combined efforts. Basically, Tycho provided excruciatingly accurate data that Kepler confirmed mathematically and extrapolated on. Kepler could have never figured out all that he did with out Tycho's data; he had bad eyesight and could not observe the sky he so dearly slaved for. It was because Tycho initially mistrusted Kepler that Kepler received only slight amounts of data that Kepler discovered that planetary orbits are elliptical - Tycho gave him only data on Mars, which happens to have the most extreme elliptical orbit, otherwise Kepler never would have noticed. Tycho also used Kepler to advance his own work and complete (among other things) the Rudolfine Tables, which are not merely the positions of planets, but guides to figure out what positions they are in at any time, (now, 586 years ago, or one thousand years into the future). The aptly-named chapters are elegantly punctuated with helpful pictures, like paintings of people discussed, illustrations of instruments, maps of the places mentioned, explanatory diagrams, and more. There are also obliging appendixes in the back, explaining astronomical terms (even

Tycho and Kepler

An amazing and inspirational account of one of the greatest stories in the history of science. Extremely well written and scholarly. I have average reading skills but at times found the book impossible to put down. In spots I had to stop reading it because emotions took over. The best book I ever read about the classical scientists.