Kepler: Stand Up For What You Believe
Hey friends,
Welcome to this weeks bonus thinker. This extra post comes as a result of the main thinker of the week. Pythagoras influenced the work of Johannes Kepler so I thought I would do some extra research into his work.
This one won’t be emailed and will live on the Substack website feature instead. Enjoy!
Johannes Kepler observed the Great Comet of 1577 and the lunar eclipse of 1580 from a small village about 30km from the centre of Stuggart in Germany. These observations left him mesmerised and greatly impacted his future achievements. Of which there are many.
Like so many in his time, Kepler planned to study theology at university with a state-funded scholarship. Despite this, he became inspired to study astronomy. Luckily it was under the greatest astronomer of the time who was also a private follower of Copernicus.
Kepler converted to Copernicus’s world system partly because he was also convinced by Platonic and Pythagorean theories of harmony and mathematics. Kepler would go on to turn Copernicus’s Sun-centred system into a dynamic universe, with the Sun actively pushing the planets around in noncircular orbits.
And it was Kepler’s notion of physical astronomy that fixed a new paradigm for other important 17th-century world-system builders, the most famous of whom was Newton. Early in the 1590s, while still a student, Kepler would make it his mission to demonstrate rigorously what Copernicus had only guessed to be the case.
You can do everything you want (just not at the same time)
When you look at the achievements that Johannes Kepler completed you will be pretty astounded.
While he is best known for his revolutionary astronomy and maths, he was also a prominent astrologer for the emperor. He wrote the foundational piece in the field of optics, described how the human eye works and invented the most accurate telescope ever made. He wrote the first mathematical description of crystals which began the entire field of crystallography and incorporated all of his ideas into a theology.
You might think that this amount of output is inhuman. That for the rest of us it is impossible to do such detailed work in so many different interests. But Kepler’s secret is that he had a long term mindset.
He did his work one piece at a time. He knew that he could fulfil all of his interests as long as he didn’t try to do it all at once.
We can learn from Kepler to do the things we want to do one at a time. That way we will get around to all our interests in the detail they deserve and not jus shallowly at the same time.
Your intuition is not enough
When Copernicus put forward his heliocentric (Earth orbits around Sun) model, he couldn’t explain the observations of the planets as well as the dogmatic geocentrism (everything orbits around Earth).
Some 50 years later, Johannes Kepler built upon Copernicus’ idea and did the maths. Kepler was able to conclude from this that the orbits of planets are ellipses.
Kepler’s three laws are still widely used today and helped give rise to Newton’s law of gravitation. None of this would have happened if he hadn’t done the quantitative work and followed where it led.
Copernicus’s intuition alone was not enough to prove the truth. Maths was needed to prove the ideas as true. We can learn from Kepler that we need to have some sort of quantitative results if we want our ideas to be accepted.
Stand up for your ideas
Kepler lived through in a Europe that had been on the brink of religious war for years. Unfortunately for Kepler, both sides still agreed that changing our model of the solar system was bad news bears.
His early adoration of the Copernican Model caused him to be ousted from any future involvement with the clergy. He was persecuted by the Catholic Church who viewed his beliefs as heresy.
Kepler was able to have the confidence to go up against the Catholic church because he was able to prove his ideas with quantitative backing and have some sort of rational proof of his argument.
He teaches us that we should go up against dogmatic views or organisations that we don't think are correct as long as we can be sure of our arguments and see our cause as almost self-evident.
We need to be very careful that the ideas we believe in or promote are good ones. The world that we live in is incredibly complex. There are countless variables to take into account and it is impossible to control for all of them.
What this means is that there is a fairly high probability that we are going to be wrong.
Kepler fought for his idea of heliocentrism so much because he had results that made him sure of it. We can learn a valuable lesson from this. When we have reliable results and others aren’t accepting our ideas then we should stand up for what we believe as much as we possibly can.
