Johannes Kepler: Understanding Science’s Greatest Anti-Hero
It seems as though trendy fiction today is saturated with the broody, nuanced, nearly-villainous leading characters.
Walter White, Tyrion Lannister, Mystique, Alexander Hamilton, Sherlock Holmes (the Cumberbatch version)— it’s not a tough list to pull together. We like seeing characters who are self-serving, make morally-gray decisions, and triumph in the end at the cost of great personal sacrifice. These are geniuses who see the world from revolutionary, new angles and will stop at nothing to make their visions a reality.
It’s sexy. It’s dramatic. It’s Johannes Kepler, the 17th Century astronomer.
Kepler was broody AF.
Since an early age Kepler considered himself to be hazardously unlucky. He was beaten by his father — a mercenary who abandoned the family—and in his youth was later stricken with a severe case of smallpox that crippled his hands and eyesight. Through the misfortune, though, Kepler learned to look towards the paths of the stars and planets in hopes of understanding the chaotic, dismal world beneath his feet. Astrology, horoscopes, and star-charts became an early obsession.
He learned all this from his mother — a spiritual woman in her own right who allegedly sparked this inspiration in a young Johannes by taking him to see a comet at the age of five.
That mother (spoiler alert) would later be charged for witchcraft and Kepler would have to mount her defense in court. Baller.
Through the trauma, Kepler emerged as an absolutely brilliant kid. He loved puzzles and jokes, but found himself isolated during early schooling due to his constant illness. Apparently since childhood he compiled a list of enemies and rivals, a habit he’d remain fond of through later life as well. To add a splash more eccentricity, he’d recount this through journals written in the third person:
“From the beginning of his life this man had many enemies,” wrote Johannes Kepler in his autobiographical notes, titled Self-Analysis
Kepler found himself with an almost immediate talent for mathematics and geometry, but given his fascination with the Godly forces that shaped his life on earth, he dreamed of joining the Lutheran Church as a minister. To Kepler, math and science were not at odds with religious doctrine — he viewed the two as halves of a whole, both necessary ingredients in better answering questions about his fate in the world.
The Church had other plans.
Keep in mind, this was the late 1500s. Nicolaus Copernicus had died over 60 years prior and his model for a sun-centric solar system had been largely written off as a clever thought-experiment, but nothing more. Kepler was one of the few budding astronomers who thought there was truth to these ideas — what if the earth actually did revolve around the sun?
Europe had been on the brink of religious war for years, but both sides still agreed that changing our model of the solar system was bad news bears. Kepler’s early adoration of the Copernican Model caused him to be ousted from any future involvement with the clergy. Math was his backup, and Kepler’s unique stance in the narrow overlap between religion and natural law put him in the crosshairs of aggression from both sides.
And this is when things get wild.
At the very end of the 16th Century — literally New Years Eve, 1599, if you can imagine that perfect storytelling — Johannes Kepler reached rock bottom. He was a district mathematician working in Graz, a University city in the Holy Roman Empire, but found himself hounded by tax collectors and under constant threat of disownment by his father in law, a noble mill-owner named Jobst Müller who hated Kepler for literally all the reasons. He had found the bottom of the barrel.
Enter Tycho Brahe!
This was a man who got his nose chopped off in a duel and replaced it with a golden prosthetic. He had a pet elk, but it died when one night it got drunk at a party and fell down the stairs. All true.
Brahe was a fellow astronomer, but where Kepler lacked social acuity, Brahe had it in spades. He had reached near-celebrity status by cozying up to European rulers who would fund his elaborate astronomical endeavors — as a result, he had amassed the world’s largest (at the time) library of celestial data, but he hit a roadblock in proving his new “Tychonic Model” of the solar system to be any better than Copernicus’s. He knew that partnering with a genius upstart mathematician like Kepler would be the key to making history.
He and Kepler, famously, did not get along. When Kepler refused to help on the Tychonic research in favor of developing his own theories, Brahe shut him out. The library of data was kept behind locked doors and out of Kepler’s reach, just as he found himself closer than ever to the celestial answers he’d searched for his whole life.
Tycho Brahe died suddenly just months later in October, 1601.
What happened next was a domino effect that would solidify Johannes Kepler as a founder of modern astronomy — he gained access to Brahe’s data, published his seminal work, and rewrote Europe’s understanding of science, physics, and the universe.
But his story doesn’t stop there — for the years to follow, Kepler sat in the crosshairs of one of history’s most treacherous unsolved murders, all the while dodging persecution from the Catholic Church who viewed his beliefs as heresy. He would eventually go on to redefine Calendar Law (it’s a thing), write the world’s first science-fiction novel, publish the early precursors to the theory of gravity, defend his mother in court against witchcraft, and become a contemporary of Galileo Galilei during his own trials and tribulations against Catholic imprisonment.
Oh and he’d become the Royal Court Astronomer to this guy:
The saga of Johannes Kepler is more inspirational than I had ever imagined, and for about five years I’ve grown immersed in his journey from trauma to treachery to triumph. He was an underdog born into a cruel world, and through it all, he found himself the hero of our history books. Many of us don’t care to look deeply into his journey…but we should.
I’ll be posting a series of articles on Kepler over the next few months, flushing out the background of his life, his world, and the people who shaped his narrative. Kepler lived in Europe during an era of war, plague, and religious extremism, but through it all developed the theories that ushered in history’s largest leaps forward in understanding our solar system. All it took was an untimely death to make his dream possible.
He’s science’s first anti-hero, and his story deserves to be told.
Author’s Note: I am 100% aware that despite the longstanding theories about Tycho Brahe’s death and the seedy motivations of Johannes Kepler, yes in 2012 a re-examination of Brahe’s remains showed that the leading theory (mercury poisoning) was no longer credible.
Does this mean that Kepler didn’t kill Tycho Brahe? Heck no, it just means that he didn’t use mercury. Nobody can know for certain what lead to Brahe’s death, but what’s undeniable is that Johannes Kepler was a lead suspect in this tragedy for the decades and centuries to follow. That’s the story I want us to tell — not how the death happened, but the certain aftermath that followed Kepler through history.
