JOHANNES    KEPLER

Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order and the Heresy Trial of His Mother by James A. Connor ; Published by Harper ; Pages 402 ;Price Rs 799/-

                               **********************

Isaac Newton is reported to have famously said, “ If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”.

One of the giants is Johannes Kepler. The book under review is the biography of Kepler by James A. Connor, a former Jesuit and professor of English at Kean University in New Jersey. The "Witch" in  the title is Kepler's mother, who was tried and convicted of heresy in 1621.

A new trend in biography was initiated by Dava Sobel who in her "Galileo's Daughter," analysed the great scientist employing as medium his hardly famous  relative. Sobel used  Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo’s illegitimate daughter, a cloistered nun. 

Kepler lived from 1571 to 1630, making him a contemporary of William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei. He was one of the giants on whose work the Scientific Revolution was based, and in particular he worked out the laws of planetary motion, later used by Isaac Newton in developing his theory of gravity.

 Kepler was a man of deep abiding faith who lived through a time in religious history when people, especially women, were tortured and burned at the stake for being “witches.” One of those women was his mother, Katharina, a victim of a hateful neighbor and a society caught up in religious hysteria.

Kepler had a tough life, born in stark  poverty in  Weil der Statt, a German town, with an abusive father. An attack of smallpox ,as a small child,  left him with poor eyesight and later compelled  him to depend on the observations of other astronomers for the data he needed. Above all he had to witness his elderly mother go on trial for witchcraft.

 Kepler’s mother was stubborn and self-destructive and she probably caused the ailments that her critics attributed to witchcraft. A dabbler in herbal medicine, she rarely cleaned her mixing bowl. "Who knows what kinds of bacteria were growing in there?" according to Connor .

The  mother  was obnoxious and her accuser in the witchcraft trial, Ursula Reinbold, a former prostitute and vicious gossip, was equally repulsive. The  town magistrate apprehended and tyrannized Kepler’s mother  even when  he was drunk.

Kepler’s discoveries during the dark times of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries changed our understanding of the world around us, especially his three basic laws of planetary motion, which provided proof of the Copernican system, and his often unrecognized contributions to Newton’s gravitational law, the basics of optics, and the foundation for the invention of the calculus.

Kepler is best known for his three laws of planetary motion. The first, the "law of ellipses," says that each planet follows an elliptical orbit with the sun at one focus of the ellipse. The second, the "law of equal areas," says "the radius vector joining a planet and the sun sweeps out an equal area over an equal period of time." The third law addresses the overall solar system: It provides a formula to describe the relationship between the orbital periods of planets and their distances from the sun. Kepler is also known for his breakthrough in optics; he was the first to explain how a telescope works.

During the Counter-Reformation,   theological originality of Kepler was condemned  by the Lutheran Church, to which Kepler belonged, as well as by the Roman Catholic Church, which persecuted Protestants and encouraged him to convert. Kepler stuck to his conscience – resulting in his excommunication by the Lutherans.

Kepler's professional relationships also were strained by his commitment to the truth. At the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, he worked closely with Tycho Brahe, the Danish optical astronomer. Yet the two disagreed on the structure of the solar system. Kepler believed the sun was at the system's center; Tycho believed the planets circled the sun, but the sun circled the Earth.

  The 17th century was a tortuous era   when   ignorance, corruption and religious hatred   overthrew  knowledge, ethical behavior and religious tolerance.

 Kepler’s  spiritual quest, and his constant search for some kind of harmonious universal order made this amazing man a borderline saint. The scientist’s  acumen resulted in  major discoveries that placed him right next to Galileo as one of the world’s greatest astronomers.

  Kepler struggled with his mother’s torture and trial and fought to keep his place in the changing Lutheran church, and to find work as a man of science with such luminaries as Tycho Brahe. He married several times and watched his first wife and many of his children die from simple diseases that today would have been cured with one round of antibiotics. He watched as the Holy Roman Church sent out waves of violence against heretics and even men of science, and his heart broke as the religious leaders of his time became more monsters than men. For Kepler, scientific discovery was only half of his life. The other half was finding spiritual truth, and he knew it was not present in the witch-burnings of the Catholic Church.

 “Kepler’s Witch” is a fascinating account of this man’s scientific evolvement and intellectual growth. It is a chilling chronicle of the war between religion and nature and the widening rift between the various religious factions that sought dominion during the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the following days of social upheaval. This is an extraordinary book that serves as both biography, history and a scathing indictment of the dangers of religious fanaticism as seen through the eyes of a man who lost his mother to the fires of Godly violence.

 Kepler will always be remembered for setting the foundations of planetary motion and literally handing Newton everything he needed for the law of gravity he took credit for.He knew deep in his heart that science and spirituality were on the same page, even as the Church leaders around him were in constant denial.

An extract from Connor’s book will give an idea of the style and content.

“Great people show up now and then in the world. What makes them great is complicated. Some say Kepler was a genius, which he certainly was, but his scientific intelligence was not the source of his greatness. Johannes Kepler was one of the most powerful scientific minds of his century—he was an equal to Galileo in almost every way, a precursor to Newton, a man who had done the spadework for most of the important discoveries that defined science in the seventeenth century. And yet Kepler was also great in the way Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are great. He was a man who fought for peace and reconciliation between the Christian churches, even when it nearly cost him his life. Some people are born to greatness; some are made great by the events of their day. Some, such as King, Gandhi and Kepler became great because they made choices full of moral courage.”

Connor has illuminated the life and work one of the greatest stargazers in human history.

PPR

08/07/2018.