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Steven Li
Grace Chang
Bible 101
8 May 2020
The Legendary Life Of Johannes Kepler
Kepler was born into a Christian family in Weill, Germany in 1571. His father is a
professional mercenary with a coarse personality. He has gone out to fight several times. Once,
he ran away from home and never came back. It is said that he died on his way home after taking
part in the battle. So Kepler was brought up by his mother. Perhaps because of the influence of
his father, his mother is quite eccentric. His mother is the daughter of the tavern owner. In
addition to visiting the tavern, she often collects herbs for treatment. She is believed to be able to
perform witchcraft as well and nearly died later.
Kepler got smallpox when he was three years old, causing damage to his hands, fingers,
and eyesight. Although he is not in good health, he has to serve at the table of the tavern run by
his mother at a young age. Although his childhood was full of pain and anxiety, he was gifted
with intelligence, won a scholarship to attend German writing school, and then transferred to
Latin School. In 1589 he received a scholarship to study theology and mathematics at Tubingen
University. At that time, astronomy was regarded as part of mathematics.
From the famous astronomy Professor Michael mastlin, Kepler came into contact with
Copernicus's heliocentric universe system. At that time, the church pursued the cosmological
system proposed by Ptolemaeus in the second century, that is, the earth is the center of the
universe, and the sun and all planets revolve around the earth. Copernicus believed that the sun
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was the center of the universe. The earth and the other five planets known at that time all
revolved around the sun. Kepler soon believed in Copernicus's cosmological system and became
its champion.
Kepler is a devout Christian, determined to be a priest. When he graduated, he has been a
mathematics teacher at Graz Seminary of Protestantism in Austria, so astrology professor
Maastrin recommended him to teach, which changed his life. When he taught in Graz, Kepler
began to devote himself to the understanding of the universe, because he believed that it was the
duty of Christians to understand the universe created by God. He devoted a lot of time to Greek
geometry. Under Copernicus's cosmic system, he began to wonder why there were only six
planets just right? What determines the distance between the orbits of planets? He holds the
belief that "when God designs the universe, he must use geometry" to find the answer to the
problem. First of all, he found that the ratio of the circumscribed radius to the inscribed radius of
an equilateral triangle is approximately equal to the ratio of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. But
when he tried to find the orbits of Mars and other planets similarly, he couldn't get the right
answer. So he went on to think about three-dimensional graphics to solve the problem. In ancient
Greece, five kinds of regular polyhedron were well known: regular tetrahedron, regular
hexahedron (cube), regular octahedron, regular dodecahedron, and regular icosahedron. The five
are collectively called Platonic polyhedron.
In 1600, Kepler's Lutheran Protestant faith was unable to meet the Archduke who was a
Catholic at that time, so he was forced to leave Graz. He left for Prague, Czech Republic, to
work as an assistant to the Tycho. Tycho is the greatest naked-eye astronomy observer of our
time (before the invention of telescope). He has rich astronomical observation data. Tycho
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assigned Kepler to study and analyze the orbit of Mars. At first, Kepler thought he could solve
the problem in eight days. Unexpectedly, the work was much more difficult than he thought. He
vividly described it as a "war with Mars.". Next year, Tycho died of illness, and Kepler became
the Royal mathematician of Rudolph II. It took him some ingenuity to gain control of the large
amount of observation data left by Tycho. Often distracted by the study of many cosmic
problems, it was not until 1627 that the Rudolph catalog was finished and published. This
catalog records the positions and directions of more than one thousand planets and known
planets. It is the most complete and accurate catalog of planets in that era.
But in 1611, a peaceful life ended. After his beloved son and wife died of infectious
diseases, and the new emperor could not tolerate Protestants, Kepler was forced to leave his job
again because of religious disputes and came to Linz, Austria today. His main work in this period
is to explore all kinds of harmonious phenomena in the universe. He believes that all kinds of
harmonious phenomena, including the harmony of music and the harmony of planetary motion,
can be expressed mathematically. He wrote his research experience into the book harmony of the
universe, which was officially published in 1619. Just before this book was published, he was
inspired to come up with the third law of planetary motion (periodic law): the square of all
planetary periods is directly proportional to the third power of the semi principal axis of the
elliptical orbit. "Harmony of the universe" has five volumes, and the third law only accounts for
a small part of the fifth volume, but it is the most important part of the whole book because his
opinion led Newton to discover gravitation later.
In 1630, at the age of 58, Kepler was in economic trouble again, so he left for
Regensburg, Germany, hoping to get back some debts. He was starving and cold along the way.
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He was ill and died of a high fever as soon as he got there. Throughout Kepler's legendary life,
Christian faith has always been the core of his life and scholarship. Kepler once said, "I
demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inbuilt on all sides; that it is
insignificantly small, and is bone through the stars.". Kepler is a firm Christian. All his scientific
research is based on God's creation of all things in the universe. It is precise because of this
correct cognition that he will have great achievements in the field of science.