Kepler/Joan of Arc

I recently read 3 books about Kepler (one novel and 2 nonfiction books) and a biography of Joan of Arc that had some intriguing similarities and differences.

Kepler was a medieval mathematician and astronomer who used Tycho Brahe's exceptionally complete and accurate measurements of the position of Mars to determine that its orbit was elliptical, not circular. Medieval people believed the heavens reflected the perfection of God, in contrast to the obvious imperfection of life on earth. They also believed the circle was the most perfect shape. Therefore, all movement in the heavens was supposed to be circular. Kepler was a Lutheran who studied for the ministry but was shunted into teaching math instead, probably because of his irascible personality and his tendency to disagree with some of the finer points of church doctrine.

The first book about Kepler that I read was John Banville's novel Kepler. I wasn't that impressed with it while I was reading, although Banville can certainly put a good sentence together, as well as pulling the reader into the world of the story and his characters. The two main problems I had with it were, first, that his main character (Kepler) just wasn't that sympathetic, and second, that a section of the latter part of the book was out of chronological order in a way that didn't, to me, seem thematically justified. But it must have been a better novel than I realized at the time, because it has stuck with me quite vividly. He did an amazing job portraying Kepler's grouchy, alternately arrogant and self-denigrating character, without a single note that didn't ring true.

Then I read Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe and the Murder Behind One of History's Greatest Scientific Discoveries by Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder. Published in 2004, it makes a convincing case that Johannes Kepler murdered Brahe in order to gain custody of his Mars observations. The key evidence, in addition to what was already known about Brahe's death, is an analysis of Brahe's hair that shows a huge spike of mercury before he died. Kepler was about to lose his access to the Mars tables, and Brahe had bequeathed them to his family in his will, but Kepler made off with them shortly after Brahe's death. If he had not, it's likely someone else would have discovered the elliptical orbit of Mars, probably much later. The portrait of Kepler that emerges from the factual record laid out in this book is consistent with the portrait drawn in Banville's novel, although in the novel, Kepler has nothing to do with Brahe's death.

Next, I read Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue and the Heresy Trial of His Mother by James A. Connor, also published in 2004. Connor's view of Kepler is almost hagiographical. In his view, it was Kepler's deep religious faith that moved him to study the heavens and persist in his work until he learned the truth. This isn't completely off-base, since Kepler did have strong religious views that he was not willing to compromise in order to get along with church authorities, and he did subscribe to the traditional view that the heavens reflected the perfection of God. But even in this one book, there is enough evidence of his quick-tempered, resentful personality to clash with the overall picture Connor tries to paint. Connor (who could not have read Heavenly Intrigue before writing Kepler's Witch, since both books were published the same year) explains Brahe's death, as most previous historians had, as an accidental overdose of mercury from a medical remedy. The Gilders discuss this theory and find it unlikely that Brahe, who frequently prepared remedies of this type and knew what a lethal dose of mercury was, would accidentally take an overdose of a remedy he had himself prepared. Picking this book up immediately after Heavenly Intrigue, I found one line in the foreword (written by someone with NASA's Kepler Mission) particularly jarring: "Kepler was a man of peace in search of harmony - in particular, the harmony of the heavens."

Donald Spoto's Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint might seem like an odd comparison, but as I read it, I found more and more points of comparison with Connor's book about Kepler. Connor is a former Jesuit and Spoto a former monk. Spoto clearly admires Joan of Arc, just as Connor admires Kepler. Both biographical subjects were religious, Joan Catholic and Kepler Lutheran. And Kepler's aggressive nature may have a certain parallel with Joan's impatience with other French military leaders' defensive strategies and with her role as a leader of armies - although Joan used to weep in sympathy for wounded enemy soldiers after a battle.

But with Spoto's book, it seemed that his admiration for Joan came directly from the large body of evidence about her life. Unlike Connor, who frequently had to make awkward excuses for behavior of Kepler's that didn't comfortably fit the portrait of a devout man of peace, Spoto allows Joan's personality, in all its complexity and contradictions, to emerge from the evidence itself. In the past, Joan's biographers have tended to fall into two camps: those who accept her visions uncritically as just what Joan said they were - messages from God - and those who explain the visions as manifestations of schizophrenia, an inner ear infection, or some such physical or mental infirmity. Spoto points out that Joan led a physically vigorous life, commanded soldiers with sound and practical military good sense, and defended herself from rhetorical-theological traps in her heresy trial with the skill of a theologian, so it seems unlikely her visions were a manifestation of illness. At the same time, he does not take them literally as some of her biographers used to do. He writes, "People do not have immediate experiences of God. Protracted and dramatic awareness of the Beyond is necessarily mediated through the terms and forms of one's culture; one might speak about 'the voice of God' or the 'voices of the angels.'" And: "It is important to remember that (a mystic) never fully understands the experience and is forced to use the language of metaphor or poetry to communicate what is utterly transcendent. The ordinary limitations of language, which describe common experiences, have to be broken."

Margad, that's a pretty interesting story about Kepler. I'd heard of the man when studying astronomy but didn't realize there might have been some interesting twists to the story.

The line from the forward sounds pretty awful. I would agree that scientists are often looking for harmony in some form or another, but that doesn't preclude them leading rather chaotic lives or behaving in fairly unpleasant ways.

You make a good point, Carlos. I have thought sometimes that the themes authors choose for their books tend to develop ideas they feel are missing from their lives. A hot-tempered man writes about finding peace; an unmarried woman like Jane Austen writes about courtship and marriage. Perhaps Kepler was doing something similar in his search for mathematical harmony.

Hi, margad

I haven't posted to this thread because I have nothing to add, but I just wanted to say that I found it extremely interesting. I've studied both Joan of Arc and Kepler in the past, and find them both interesting characters. I'd never have tied them together but in the vaguest sense (such as "Europeans who lived a long time ago"). Thanks for your thought-provoking post.

Thanks, Nickelini!

Margad, i could have sworn recalling brahe as bursting his bladder from holding it in after drinking lots of beer -- is that in Banville maybe? Also, Banville's Kepler is best read after his Copernicus as the style of the two are very different -- the one similarity is that banville has a way with verbs. He finds the best damn single-syllable old english verbs and uses them when the sound sense is perfect.

As far as seeking harmony because you have it or you do not, I would like to suggest that the harmony in everyday life is lost because one seeks something (unless one is lucky enough to have money and time). What Riftkin observed about entropy, that one reduces it within at the cost of increasing/accelerating it without holds true.

As far as Kepler doing in Brahe goes, especially in a surreptitious manner, I can't see it -- it does not fit his temper. I would expect that of someone less vitrolic. But do the authors think Brahe deserved it?

Yes, keigu, the traditional view (and the one accepted at the time) is that Brahe was eating and drinking prodigiously at dinner with friends and relatives, and was too polite to excuse himself to relieve his bladder. By the time dinner was over, the theory went, his bladder was so full he couldn't pass any urine, and he died as a result. Mercury poisoning does actually cause this symptom of being unable to pee, which is one bit of evidence among others (especially the hair analysis, which is fairly conclusive) that leads modern scientists to conclude Brahe died of mercury poisoning.

The Gilders seem quite sympathetic with Brahe, who evidently tolerated a lot of temper tantrums from Kepler, while keeping him employed during a time when Kepler really had nowhere else to turn. The Emperor had agreed to pay Kepler a stipend, but it was next-to-impossible to wrestle that stipend out of the Holy Roman Empire bureaucracy, and once the Emperor agreed to pay it, he didn't bother following up to make sure it was indeed paid. Brahe was helpful in regard to Kepler's dealings with the Emperor. So Kepler was quite dependent on Brahe - something which may well have caused him to feel resentful, especially since Brahe was politely tight-fisted about his Mars observations. Brahe had his own ideas about planetary motion that were inconsistent with Kepler's ideas, and he employed Kepler to do mathematical calculations to support the proof of Brahe's theories, which would surely have grated on Kepler's nerves. In both of the nonfiction books, as well as Banville's novel, Brahe comes across as a genuinely nice guy - who would nevertheless have infuriated someone like Kepler whose overriding passion was to find out the objective truth.

Can you say more about Rifkin's observations on entropy? What you mention sounds intriguing.

Banville's novels about Copernicus and Newton are both on my TBR list. His prose tended to disappear for me, which I consider high praise - I like to feel I'm inside the novel, and Kepler certainly had that effect. It makes sense that the vigor and simplicity of Banville's verbs would help to carry me inside the novel.

Re. entropy. Take a living body. It maintains its order at the expense of killing and eating other bodies and pooping into its surroundings, which thereby become disordered and polluted I recall the Japanese translator of Rifkin's book, a famous translator of science books with some books of his own, boasted in his translator's Afterword, that R was wrong to say growth inevitably increased disorder, for "we Japanese" also have less crime and other social problems, and our cities are not ruined because of suburb growth, etc. etc. and are not like the Occident from which Riftkin draws his examples. And, I recall thinking, yes, but you import most of your wood for your growth and are creating disorder in other parts of the world (mudslides in the Philippines etc.. .) I am not saying R's extrapolation from a law of thermodynamics to biology (the above is too simple) much less societies was right, but there was something to it.

Interesting. Does Rifkin think the disorder and pollution is inevitable, or simply a result of overpopulation which has unbalanced the world's harmony? One could certainly make an argument for the harmoniousness of poop when it cycles back as compost for plant growth.

Amen, on the poop! cruz c.1550 observed it in china, the miraculous economic power of the day and i give five pgs to it in Topsy-turvy 1585 (in the ch on architecture and gardening). Rifkin engages both energy use and over-population. I think of his book as a precursor of new science but pessimistic rather than optimistic (and i think pessimistic is right) about our future if the so-called american dream lives.

Amen, on population, too. In a a letter to the J. Times in the 1980's and bk published by a major jpse publisher (hakusuisha), I advocated a Nobel Peace Prize for those who started China's 1-child policy. In the long run, all the faults in the Chinese program will be seen as misdemeanors in comparison to the larger crime of destroying the biosphere by ignoring population control and energy/resource rationing.

margad, i posted a reply but it dissappeared.

Your reply came through just fine, keigu. Sometimes it takes awhile for a post to come through, and it temporarily seems to disappear. Although I did lose the original post I made on this topic and had to rewrite it. I console myself with the thought that the second version was an improvement over the first.

It's tricky, I think, to get the optimism/pessimism balance right on the environment. If we get too pessimistic, we won't try to solve the problems because it will seem futile; if we get too optimistic, people won't bother because they'll think everything's going to turn out okay no matter what. I hope there's still hope, and we can turn things around, but we really should have started turning this monster ship of destruction around about 10 or 20 years ago.

I totally agree with you about China's one-child policy, although we are part of a lonely band. This might be an interesting topic to bring up in the Pro and Con group.