Johannes Kepler - Biography (cont.)

In 1615, his own mother, Frau Katherine Kepler, was accused of practicing witchcraft, as her aunt had been in the past. Kepler journeyed to Wurttemburg to defend her, enlisting the help of the legal faculty from Tübingen, with positive results. Frau Kepler was freed on the grounds that her accusers had resorted to torture to get a confession. Kepler tried to convince her to move in with him in Linz, but she decided to remain at her home. The witch trials resumed, and in 1620, Frau Kepler would once again arrested, but again, she stood firm, and did not confess. She was freed, but died a year later.

In 1619, Kepler published "Harmonice Mundi", a 5 book set containing volumes geometry, the musical harmonies, the music of the spheres, and astrology, representing the culmination of Kepler's research into the structure of the universe in which he presented his third law.

Kepler's third Law: The squares of the periods of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their semi-major axes.

The "Harmonice Mundi", is considered by many to be Kepler's greatest achievement, while "Astronomia Nova" is considered his most important work in the field of astronomy. In "Harmonice Mundi", Kepler published the results of years of research on the "music of the spheres" which was based on his belief that the entire "Universe" was arranged in accordance to abstract notions of beauty and harmony. While at first, he believed he could prove his theories based on the closest to farthest distances between the planets from the sun, he soon realized he would get more musically acceptable results by calculating the planet's angular velocities in relation to the sun, assigning a different musical interval to each planet, assigning the outer notes of the interval to the the lowest and highest velocities.

While we only cover Kepler's major works, it would be important to point out that he was an incredibly prolific writer, and that in addition to his major works, he published a large number of smaller documents, and is even considered the father of science fiction, for having penned "Somnium", a novel published after his death, in which he described a trip to the moon. It would also be important to note that Kepler's correspondance to his peers was sometimes so richly detailed, that it could have been considered of equal importance to his scientific publications. All of the information on this website comes from Kepler's letters. While some of the finer points and dates may have been lost in the translation, Kepler remains one of the best known scientists of his day.

In 1625, Kepler published his last important work, that of the "Tabulae Rudolphinae", in which he corrected some of the errors in the tables of planetary motion. The tables were so named in honor of Rudolph II.

In 1628, Kepler found work as the Private Mathematician to the Duchy of Sagan, but as prestigious as this new position may have seemed, he still had great difficulty collecting his pay, and ended up having to leave his wife and children behind to go on a trip in 1630, hoping to collect on an old debt. Kepler, probably hungry and exhausted from the journey, fell ill, and had to stop to rest in Regensburg. There, unable to recover, he died, on November 15th, 1630, at the age of 59. As if a life of constant struggle wasn't enough, the cemetery in which his bones were interred was desecrated by a conquering army in 1633.

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