Kepler, perhaps the first true scientist

Johannes Kepler was walking in a Prague snowfall feeling badly about not having a New Year’s gift for his friend Mattias Wacker in 1610.  It got him to thinking about snowflakes, how each was unique and six-sided.  He began thinking about the mathematics of snow, always six-sided yet each flake unique. Made of frozen water, perhaps the frozen form must be arranging itself to minimize space, like a six-sided honeycomb.  His quick study turned out to be a pamphlet-book, On The Six-Sided Snowflake, which he sent to his friend as a gift, then published it in 1611. That paper is now considered the origin of cystallography.  “For a long time,” he later wrote, I wanted to become a theologian.  Now however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated through astronomy.”  Kepler had no doubt that God was a God of reason and order, a mathematician who left clues in nature for man to comprehend. 

            He was a German Lutheran boy and the Danish master astronomer, Tycho Brahe, had lent him a set of instruments. There was no word for ‘scientist’ in 1600.  He called himself  a “grubber for facts” from an expression about how farm chickens peck around grubbing for food.  On Feb. 19, 1604, Kepler was trying to measure the position of Mars and freezing, was disgusted with his results. Other astronomers like Copernicus felt that measurements within 10 minutes of a degree where just fine.  Kepler wanted a single minute.  Copernicus had merely speculated that the sun was the center of the solar system and that planets went around in circles on crystalline spheres.  Brahe had disproven the crystal spheres theory. Now what?  Kepler knew the answer was to postulate orbits, mere paths in space and what if there were forces around an object?  If you were trying to row a boat across a raging river, you’d curve your trajectory but a circular path is hardly expected.  He tried to fit a circular orbit to Mars but it didn’t work.  He tried an ellipse with the sun at a focus, from better data on a warmer night and found a perfect fit. In 1606 he published his book, New Star, explaining his measurements in exacting detail, including his wife’s acid critique and all the false turns and observations gone wrong.  These were expanded upon in 1609’s New Astronomy including 3 laws of planetary motion. Measurements were no longer approximations, but mathematical facts. The force in space was not a raging river, but, the world would find out the meaning of gravity.

            The reader must understand this era. Salem’s Witch Trials were 80 years into the future.  Everyone believed witches existed and magic too. Mathematicians like Galileo had a day job of teaching accounting. A new tool of medicine was bleeding the patient.  But Kepler was certain in his deep Christian faith that God had patterns in nature and he worked hard to decipher them.  When he discovered his 3 planetary laws, he experienced something of a spiritual epiphany, writing a prayer at the end of his thesis, “God, graciously cause these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and the salvation of souls.”  Kepler was not only the first mathematical scientific theorist, his findings  led to the surprising recognition that religious  motivation can sometimes make discoveries and it led to change the course of scientific history.

            In 1615, a woman in a financial dispute with Kepler's brother claimed Kepler's mother Katharina had made her sick with an evil brew resulting in Katharina being accused of witchcraft. In August 1620, she was imprisoned for fourteen months. Katharina was subjected to territio verbalis, a graphic description of the torture awaiting her as a witch, in a final attempt to make her confess.  Johannes came to her trial with stories of how she had raised him to love Jesus, so how could she collude with Satan? He put together a strong legal defense the way a scientist proves truth.  The court was flabbergasted. The accusers had no stronger evidence than rumors. Katharina was released.  As the case became known, all of Germany began to debate, as Kepler had done, whether witches really were powerful or even existed. 

            Order, simplicity, beauty of nature, directed by a seemingly intelligent harmony—even secular scientists cannot get away from these assumptions today which are Christian to the hilt. The first theoretical science is often attributed to a premature-born, sickly  boy from a small town near Stuttgart who believed the gospel with all his heart.