Ferguson charts the history of measuring stuff in the sky from the ancients to the end of the 20th century. The viewpoint is always from the viewer of the time, making the interesting perspective of what was not known when the discoveries are made. The historical chapters concerning Ptolemy, Cope...
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 years - mostly in his native Denmark and then in Prague under the patronage of the Holy Roman Emp...
Sixth Century B.C. THE PYTHAGOREAN DISCOVERY that “all things known have number—for without this, nothing could be thought of or known”—was made in music. It is well established, as so few things are about Pythagoras, that the first natural law ever formulated mathematically was the relationship ...
Pythagoras and his followers had been sure they had caught a glimpse, as through a crack or a keyhole, of truth based on numbers that lay beyond the façade of nature. Johannes Kepler would force the door wide open, once and for all. After him, ironically, and though Kepler did not intend it to be...
The child whose wishes Tycho had taken too lightly had come of age and was now king. Tycho had suffered recent social embarrassment over Magdalene’s ill-fated betrothal, but he nevertheless made a splendid showing at the festivities. He wore the golden chains of the Order of the Elephant (a symbo...