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 so, the Pythagorean concept of the music of the spheres would survive only in poetic imagery. Yet in a profound and magnificent way, the faith embodied in that concept – faith in a wondrously rational and ordered universe – tempered by Kepler’s imaginative genius and rigorous mathematics, would finally place real examples of that music under the feet of science. The higher seminary at Maulbronn, which Kepler attended in the 1580s as a troubled but exuberantly intellectual and religious teenager, taught ‘spherics’ and arithmetic, but it was not until he enrolled at the University of Tübingen that he encountered astronomy. The mission of the Stift at the university where Kepler studied and had his lodgings was to prepare young men for careers of service to the Duke of Württemberg or for the Lutheran clergy, but the course of study was broadly focused.
