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Astronomia Nova
Second edition, completely revised, of the only English translation of Kepler's 1609 masterpiece. A work of astonishing originality, Astronomia Nova stands, with Copernicus's De Revolutionibus and Newton's Principia as one of the founding texts of the scientific revolution. Kepler revolutionized astronomy by insisting that it be based upon physics rather than ideal geometrical models.
574 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1609
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About the author
Johannes Kepler
252 books162 followersJohannes Kepler (German pronunciation: [ˈkɛplɐ]) was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, and key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution. He is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. These works also provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
During his career, Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, Austria, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg. Later he became an assistant to astronomer Tycho Brahe, the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II. He was also a mathematics teacher in Linz, Austria, and an adviser to General Wallenstein. Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, invented an improved version of the refracting telescope (the Keplerian Telescope), and mentioned the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei.
Kepler lived in an era when there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, but there was a strong division between astronomy (a branch of mathematics within the liberal arts) and physics (a branch of natural philosophy).
During his career, Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, Austria, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg. Later he became an assistant to astronomer Tycho Brahe, the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II. He was also a mathematics teacher in Linz, Austria, and an adviser to General Wallenstein. Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, invented an improved version of the refracting telescope (the Keplerian Telescope), and mentioned the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei.
Kepler lived in an era when there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, but there was a strong division between astronomy (a branch of mathematics within the liberal arts) and physics (a branch of natural philosophy).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 17, 2021
This is a mastodon of paperbacks. It comes in at 1.5 kg and 30 cm tall. Only towards the end of my read did I get accustomed to holding it properly and sitting suitably (while seated, a sturdy tabouret to push off of with your feet comes in handy and your lap, to help take some pressure off your hands).
Astronomia Nova was written in Latin in 1609 and wholly translated and published into English in 1992 or 383 years later. It took long enough, but Donahue's translation is immaculate and impeccable.
The author, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), was a German astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and a key figure of the scientific revolution. While diligently working on creating a new and more accurate blueprint of our planetary system, he had to deal with his mother, Katharina, being accused of and imprisoned for witchcraft, which at the end, cost her life.
In this book, Kepler, presents his findings on the motion of Mars and takes the reader, step-by-step, in reconfirming heliocentrism and compares his results with those of Brahe, Copernicus, and Ptolemy. It was Kepler that first discovered that the planets move in an oval or elliptical orbit (Kepler's 1st Law) with the sun at the focus (Kepler first coined the word 'focus' in 1604). Also, the sun-planet line sweeps out equal area in equal time (Kepler's 2nd Law). Furthermore, planets are not objects on rotating spheres but free flowing bodies.
Kepler even stated the sun rotates around its axis: "the sun, although it stays in one place, rotates as if on a lathe". He wrote this several years prior to Galileo's telescopic observation. While reading this book you get the sense of Kepler's strong insight of the essence of nature's behavior, perhaps, a trait from his "witch" mother who was a healer and herbalist? As if he was also driven by symmetry, he was looking for reciprocity, proportionality, and uniformity in everything.
You can't mention, Kepler, without introducing his mentor Tycho Brahe, who Kepler says that Brahe asked him while on his death bed "that I demonstrate everything in his hypothesis". But due to Kepler's discoveries (and possibly their sour relationship) the vow was not kept.
Kepler's work was also a foundation and inspiration behind Newton's laws of universal gravitation. Kepler describes gravitation as a "kind of pressure upon, and counter-pressure from, that air" and that there is a "power residing in the sun, which moves all the planets" and the "immaterial species residing in the sun itself, possessing inestimable strength, seeing that it is the primary activity of every motion in the universe."
Kepler, fuses the geometrical and mathematical equations and hypotheses with physical causes which resulted in a new type of astronomy the Astronomia Nova.
The missing half a star is due to the lack of clarity in certain chapters. Even, Donahue, in his introduction, says that Kepler's Latin "valued style more than clarity". Also, I rounded it down to four stars, since at times, reading the numerous calculations, does become tedious, which, Kepler, admits it himself: "If this wearisome method has filled you with loathing, it should more properly fill you with compassion for me, as I have gone through it at least seventy times, at the expense of a great deal of time".
(4.5/5.0)
Astronomia Nova was written in Latin in 1609 and wholly translated and published into English in 1992 or 383 years later. It took long enough, but Donahue's translation is immaculate and impeccable.
The author, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), was a German astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and a key figure of the scientific revolution. While diligently working on creating a new and more accurate blueprint of our planetary system, he had to deal with his mother, Katharina, being accused of and imprisoned for witchcraft, which at the end, cost her life.
In this book, Kepler, presents his findings on the motion of Mars and takes the reader, step-by-step, in reconfirming heliocentrism and compares his results with those of Brahe, Copernicus, and Ptolemy. It was Kepler that first discovered that the planets move in an oval or elliptical orbit (Kepler's 1st Law) with the sun at the focus (Kepler first coined the word 'focus' in 1604). Also, the sun-planet line sweeps out equal area in equal time (Kepler's 2nd Law). Furthermore, planets are not objects on rotating spheres but free flowing bodies.
Kepler even stated the sun rotates around its axis: "the sun, although it stays in one place, rotates as if on a lathe". He wrote this several years prior to Galileo's telescopic observation. While reading this book you get the sense of Kepler's strong insight of the essence of nature's behavior, perhaps, a trait from his "witch" mother who was a healer and herbalist? As if he was also driven by symmetry, he was looking for reciprocity, proportionality, and uniformity in everything.
You can't mention, Kepler, without introducing his mentor Tycho Brahe, who Kepler says that Brahe asked him while on his death bed "that I demonstrate everything in his hypothesis". But due to Kepler's discoveries (and possibly their sour relationship) the vow was not kept.
Kepler's work was also a foundation and inspiration behind Newton's laws of universal gravitation. Kepler describes gravitation as a "kind of pressure upon, and counter-pressure from, that air" and that there is a "power residing in the sun, which moves all the planets" and the "immaterial species residing in the sun itself, possessing inestimable strength, seeing that it is the primary activity of every motion in the universe."
Kepler, fuses the geometrical and mathematical equations and hypotheses with physical causes which resulted in a new type of astronomy the Astronomia Nova.
The missing half a star is due to the lack of clarity in certain chapters. Even, Donahue, in his introduction, says that Kepler's Latin "valued style more than clarity". Also, I rounded it down to four stars, since at times, reading the numerous calculations, does become tedious, which, Kepler, admits it himself: "If this wearisome method has filled you with loathing, it should more properly fill you with compassion for me, as I have gone through it at least seventy times, at the expense of a great deal of time".
(4.5/5.0)
December 16, 2024
Rarely in human experience is understanding ever emphatically developed. I posit that this work is a masterpiece of humanism, scientific progress, and scientifical development for future architectures and engineering of scientific progress. This work, as a foundation from which to analyze the universe, pivotally re-transformed the world which was sinking back into a Ptolemaic hypothesis, to look at everything once more through the lens of Copernicus: knowing that the Sun was the center of the universe. But, like Ptolemy, Copernicus fell into various errors that many similar astronomers fell into which allowed astronomers like Tycho Brahe to gain popularity, when they espoused the previous systems.
This book, in one fell swoop, took both sides of the debate, and did something which is rather inconceivable within science, something which almost never happens: he solved it. Through understanding the astronomical phenomena, this book determines the shape of planetary orbits to be lenticular. It anticipated the relative flatness of the universe, the slow variation of planetary and star positions over time, the gyration of the axial tilt, and the development of methods by which to track and record planetary behavior. He was the last of a long line of scientists and astronomers who understood Ptolemy in all his advancements. If the full transactional list of observations, that this pithy sinecure-wielding German was able to perform and calculate during his life, then the book would have been thousands of pages longer, but the unedited, unabridged version that I read fundamentally constituted itself as one of the greatest achievements of mankind, publishing only the mathematical quod erat demonstratums which were really pivotal in the understanding of the planetary relations. One such development is Chapter 59's Protheorem XI, which anticipated Kepler's second law. This was such an achievement that the Woodcut, a printing technique used to print the pages of the book and reprint them for future use, has the mathematical diagram with Urial's triumphant chariot descending down the circle. The reason why these things were so divine is that they were just good mathematics. Protheorem XI is a masterpiece of the highest order, and anyone versed in astrophysics and especially just synthetical geometry can tell you why: he is developing the fundamentals along which space and time are linked in the organization of the planetary bodies and their observation. This was a pivotal development in the studying and cataloguing of astronomical phenomena. There are two errors in this book, hard to find. One is when applying relations of terms in chapter 48 he randomly induces relations which have not been established. The other is actually in Protheorem XII in Chapter 59, when he induces the relation that KT, TI (which is equal to KH, HI by Protheorem IX) is equal to κα, μα, which necessitates that κα, μα = 2αγ, which is incorrect.
However, a work of this magnitude cannot be passed over. The character, or soul, of Kepler is within this work. He is hard at work, performing scientific experiments with his astrolabe, and in a very human way, sometimes characterizing the developments of this understanding as a war, he found himself victorious when he eventually understood things as they were, as a divine warrior would when conquering forces of darkness. You are with this astronomer as he develops the fundamental relations that would contemporaneously transform this into a rigorous science with the help of Newton and Einstein. This is one of the greatest books ever written, and in terms of astrophysics, one of primary importance to people who are involved either in that field or in any field of physics whatsoever.
This book, in one fell swoop, took both sides of the debate, and did something which is rather inconceivable within science, something which almost never happens: he solved it. Through understanding the astronomical phenomena, this book determines the shape of planetary orbits to be lenticular. It anticipated the relative flatness of the universe, the slow variation of planetary and star positions over time, the gyration of the axial tilt, and the development of methods by which to track and record planetary behavior. He was the last of a long line of scientists and astronomers who understood Ptolemy in all his advancements. If the full transactional list of observations, that this pithy sinecure-wielding German was able to perform and calculate during his life, then the book would have been thousands of pages longer, but the unedited, unabridged version that I read fundamentally constituted itself as one of the greatest achievements of mankind, publishing only the mathematical quod erat demonstratums which were really pivotal in the understanding of the planetary relations. One such development is Chapter 59's Protheorem XI, which anticipated Kepler's second law. This was such an achievement that the Woodcut, a printing technique used to print the pages of the book and reprint them for future use, has the mathematical diagram with Urial's triumphant chariot descending down the circle. The reason why these things were so divine is that they were just good mathematics. Protheorem XI is a masterpiece of the highest order, and anyone versed in astrophysics and especially just synthetical geometry can tell you why: he is developing the fundamentals along which space and time are linked in the organization of the planetary bodies and their observation. This was a pivotal development in the studying and cataloguing of astronomical phenomena. There are two errors in this book, hard to find. One is when applying relations of terms in chapter 48 he randomly induces relations which have not been established. The other is actually in Protheorem XII in Chapter 59, when he induces the relation that KT, TI (which is equal to KH, HI by Protheorem IX) is equal to κα, μα, which necessitates that κα, μα = 2αγ, which is incorrect.
However, a work of this magnitude cannot be passed over. The character, or soul, of Kepler is within this work. He is hard at work, performing scientific experiments with his astrolabe, and in a very human way, sometimes characterizing the developments of this understanding as a war, he found himself victorious when he eventually understood things as they were, as a divine warrior would when conquering forces of darkness. You are with this astronomer as he develops the fundamental relations that would contemporaneously transform this into a rigorous science with the help of Newton and Einstein. This is one of the greatest books ever written, and in terms of astrophysics, one of primary importance to people who are involved either in that field or in any field of physics whatsoever.
April 9, 2025
Phenomenal. What a dude.
This book is perhaps one of the best examples of innovative scientific works of all time. It details how Kepler discovered the Elliptical orbit through his study of the motion of Mars.
The best thing about the Astronomia from a history of science perspective is that Kepler wrote it as he progressed, so we have a live description of his method through the period & how he arrived at his conclusions. He also describes the three leading models of the time - Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic, and shows their considerable overlap and euivalence, while making significant improvements.
He also presents the best arguments for heliocentrism available from the early 17th century. Much of his theorising of the planets' movement as a result of some sort of Solar "magnetic pull" really truly sets the stage for Newton's physics, and is surprisingly close in thought to what was necessary for the full overturn of Aristotelian physics.
The translation is wonderful and understandable, with some excellent notes provided up front. The only thing that could have improved accessibility from a contemporary perspective is a presentation of some of the diagrams and processes perhaps as footnotes. But I guess the translator considered that out of scope for a translation. Nonetheless, the format of the book is wonderful. The size makes you feel like you're reading an original Early Modern book, and provides ample space in the margin for pencil notes.
Amazing read. I loved every bit of it.
This book is perhaps one of the best examples of innovative scientific works of all time. It details how Kepler discovered the Elliptical orbit through his study of the motion of Mars.
The best thing about the Astronomia from a history of science perspective is that Kepler wrote it as he progressed, so we have a live description of his method through the period & how he arrived at his conclusions. He also describes the three leading models of the time - Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic, and shows their considerable overlap and euivalence, while making significant improvements.
He also presents the best arguments for heliocentrism available from the early 17th century. Much of his theorising of the planets' movement as a result of some sort of Solar "magnetic pull" really truly sets the stage for Newton's physics, and is surprisingly close in thought to what was necessary for the full overturn of Aristotelian physics.
The translation is wonderful and understandable, with some excellent notes provided up front. The only thing that could have improved accessibility from a contemporary perspective is a presentation of some of the diagrams and processes perhaps as footnotes. But I guess the translator considered that out of scope for a translation. Nonetheless, the format of the book is wonderful. The size makes you feel like you're reading an original Early Modern book, and provides ample space in the margin for pencil notes.
Amazing read. I loved every bit of it.
September 21, 2021
To read the words that were once penned down by Kepler himself (well, the translation of those words).. To follow around in his elliptical meanderings.. Trace his steps as he slowly pondered his hypotheses from afar, and sped up as he got closer and closer to the truth.. What joy!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews