Later, Kepler spent many months between 16 preparing a legal defense when his aged but meddlesome mother was accused of and tried for witchcraft. ![]() Soon after his return in 1576, he again joined the Belgian military service for a few years and in 1588 he abandoned his family forever.Īlthough Kepler describes his mother, the former Katharina Guldenmann, as “thin, garrulous, and bad-tempered,” he adds that “treated shabbily, she could not overcome the inhumanity of her husband.” Katharina showed her impressionable son the great comet of 1577. 1 His grandfather Sebald, mayor of Weil in 1571, when Kepler was born, was “quick-tempered and obstinate.” His grandmother was “clever, deceitful, blazing with hatred, the queen of busybodies.” His father, Heinrich, was described as “criminally inclined, quarrelsome, liable to a bad end” and destined for a “marriage fraught with strife.” When Kepler was three years old, his father joined a group of mercenary soldiers to fight the Protestant uprising in Holland, thereby disgracing his family. When Kepler was twenty-five and much occupied with astrology, he compared the members of his family with their horoscopes. With the exception of Rheticus, Kepler became the first enthusiastic Copernican after Copernicus himself he found an astronomy whose clumsy geocentric or heliostatic planetary mechanisms typically erred by several degrees and he left it with a unified and physically motivated heliocentric system nearly 100 times more accurate. Regensburg, Germany, 15 November 1630)Īlthough Kepler is remembered today chiefly for his three laws of planetary motion, these were but three elements in his much broader search for cosmic harmonies and a celestial physics. ![]() Weil der Stadt, Germany, 27 December 1571 d.
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