Johannes Kepler has a good a claim as anyone to be the father of empiricism. He was the first to formulate scientific “laws” based on rigorous observation (e.g. Planets travel in ellipses- based on Brahe’s meticulous observations of Mars’ orbit).
His first book, the Mysterium Cosmographicum, published at age 25 in 1596, singehandedly makes the transition from ancient metaphysical speculation to modern empirical science.
Kepler first posits the idea that the universe is built around the Platonic solids-which form its invisible skeleton, i.e. the five Platonic solids comprise the five intervals between the then known six planets. Illustrations from the work are here (scroll down).
Kepler noted the exact date this flash of insight came to him (July 9, 1595) and as one biographer states: “it determined the course of life, and remained his main inspiration throughout it.”
But that was the ancient metaphysics-Kepler later goes on to state: “If [the observations] do not confirm the thesis, then all our previous efforts have been in vain.” And modern empirical science is away and running.
Historians of science have noted the falseness of Kepler’s inspiration, which nevertheless paved the way for the formulation of his groundbreaking laws. E.g. Koestler writes in The Sleepwalkers: “For Kepler’s misguided belief in the five perfect bodies was not a passing fancy, but remained with him, in a modified version, to the end of his life, showing all the symptoms of a paranoid delusion.”
How much we have yet to learn from the old masters.
Catching up on the science news of the week, I note that the October 9 issue of Nature features an article entitled: “Dodecahedral space topology as an explanation for weak wide-angle temperature correlations in the cosmic microwave background.”
If you’re sort of out to lunch-a dodecahedron is a…yep… a Platonic solid!
The gist of it is that observations by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001 to measure temperature ripples in the afterglow radiation from the big bang, have caused Weeks and his colleagues to posit that “space wraps back on itself in a bizarre way… Effectively, the universe [is] like a hall of mirrors, with the wraparound effect producing multiple images of everything inside… According to Weeks, the WMAP results point to a very specific illusion- that our universe seems like an endlessly repeating set of dodecahedrons, football-like shapes with a surface of 12 identical pentagons…If you exit the football through one pentagon, you re-enter the same region through the opposite face and you keep meeting the same galaxies over and over again.”
In other words, one of the galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field may be the Milky Way? weird whacky stuff- anyway, i hope they give a shout out to Johannes.
Could Kepler’s flash of insight in 1596 be confirmed (to an extent-I won’t get carried away) by a 2001 space probe? And what does that portend for what is really the source of scientific knowledge and discovery?
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