On Kepler and scientific Epiphany (repost from Twitter)
This is a lightly-edited repost of one of my favorite threads from Twitter, first posted on December 4, 2002, about Kepler and scientific Epiphany. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I reconnect to my love of the game. Enjoy!
The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler is a gripping tale of the revolution from Copernicus to Kepler to Newton. It’s flawed as a work of history, but deeply insightful about the practice of science, and all the more inspiring for both.
Koestler, quoting Kepler, captures the most representative expression of the ecstasy of scientific discovery I’ve ever seen:
Having percieved the first glimmer of dawn eighteen months ago, the light of day three months ago, but only a few days ago the plain sun of a most wonderful vision – nothing shall now hold me back. Yes, I give myself up to holy raving. I mockingly defy all mortals with this open confession: I have robbed the golden vessels of the Egyptians to make out of them a tabernacle for my God, far from the frontiers of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice. If you are angry, I shall bear it. Behold, I have cast the dice, and I am writing a book either for my contemporaries, or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred years for a reader, since God has also waited six thousand years for a witness.”
And it’s because of some total nonsense about Pythagorean harmonies in celestial motions.
Like, Kepler also comes up with the three laws of celestial motion that help unlock the Newtonian revolution. But, in Koestler’s telling, he didn’t realize those were the ecstatic discoveries. Rather, some decent-fitting numerology that was aesthetically pleasing lit him up. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t felt and done exactly this, albeit without writing down the holy raving and taunting mortals parts (except possibly on Slack or in email).
But this isn’t to mock him. It’s worth remembering Kepler and that he found the three laws, and why. He found them because, all too rare even today, no matter how much he adored his models of the then-known universe—models he thought were beautiful—were divine—it bothered him when the data didn’t quite fit. Despite himself, he couldn’t quite look the other way on errors of a few percent, even though they were only a few percent, when it was standard practice for two millennia to look away, when he knew the data were better than that. It offended his sense of divinity to look away.
And so he finds the ellipses, which offend his sense of beauty. He wanted circles, but God didn’t use circles in the heavens. The data said God used ellipses, and he had too much integrity to lie about God’s creation. So ellipses it is.
To accept that, some part of Kepler also had to accept that he may not understand God’s design. He may not understand what God considers beautiful, and that lets the light in. That integrity, that respect for the divine, for Nature, that inability to look all the way away while being really motivated to look away, is the thing I hold most holy in the practice of science. That we–I—-are so easily seduced by false harmonies speaks to the limitations of our humanity.
I’m glad I lost sleep tonight telling the void about Kepler because I get to remember that among the thousands of pages of missteps and nonsense he wrote are the three laws. He did witness God’s creation, even if he didn’t really know what he saw. May I be so lucky.
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Famulare (2024, Dec 5). On Kepler and scientific Epiphany. Retrieved from https://famulare.github.io/2024/12/05/On-Kepler-and-scientific-ephiphany.html.