One day in 1595, while teaching a class of indifferent secondary school students about the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter, it occurred to him that, based on distances employed in the Copernican model, he could inscribe an equilateral triangle between the two orbits. The insight struck him like a lightning bolt, and launched one of the most idiosyncratic investigations in the history of science. Kepler decided that a nested ordering of the five regular three-dimensional figures (called the Platonic Solids) might determine the distances between the planetary orbits. At age 25 he published his idea in a short book entitled Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Sacred Mystery of the Cosmos). - From a beautiful, concise page on Kepler.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 10:41:10 +0000
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