Ferguson: Tycho and Kepler

From Scienticity

Scienticity:
Readability:
Hermeneutics:
Charisma:
Recommendation:
Ratings are described on the Book-note ratings page.

Kitty Ferguson, Tycho & Kepler : The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens. New York : Walker & Company, 2002. xiv + 402 pages.

Kitty Ferguson, a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, had a successful career as a musician. In recent years, however, she has devoted herself to writing about science and science issues.

This work, in essence a double biography, not only draws vivid portraits of two remarkable figures in the history of science but also deftly explains the importance of the discoveries, inventions, and measurements made by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.

Her writing is lively and quite readable. The positive appreciation for her subjects comes through very clearly, making them not just figures from the murky past, but living, breathing personalities worthy of our attention today.

-- Notes by SJB

I found many likable things about this book. Ms. Ferguson's scienticity was very good. I mention this because her background does not obviously make her an expert on understanding or explaining science. Other science writers take note: it is possible to write interesting, engaging prose about scientific ideas and history and not do violence to the basic scientific concepts.

This book also gave me a very vivid portrait of how difficult scientific productivity was in time immediately before Galileo and the dawn of the Enlightenment period. So often we think of "modern science" as beginning with Galileo and Newton that we forget that anything scientific might have happened in earlier times.

As we read, it was difficult just to live long enough to get anything done, and life was difficult for even the aristocracy; it was nearly equal chances that one would not survive into adulthood. As Ms. Ferguson pointed out, science was different when the most advanced mathematics known was trigonometry. Kepler himself did not learn of Napier's invention of logarithms until near the end of his life, but he was able to use the discovery to simplify the calculations in his magnum opus that presented his planetary laws to the world.

Without taking a mystical, new-age perspective, our author also gave me a new perspective on how someone in the sixteenth century might have viewed astrology (NB: before Newton described gravity). From page 61:

[Astrology's predicting the weather] had been called into question because of so many failed predictions. However, Tycho pointed out that the Sun was responsible for the seasons of the year, and many believed (though not everyone in his time -- Galileo was to be a notable exception) that the Moon influenced the tides. To Tycho it seemed reasonable to think that the stars also had to have something to do with the turbulence of weather and other weather patterns.

-- Notes by JNS