Harmonies of the World

by Johannes Kepler, Charles Glenn Wallis (Translator)

Concerning the very perfect harmony of the celestial movements, and the genesis of eccentricities and the semidiameters, and the periodic times from the same. After the model of the most correct astronomical doctrine of today, and the hypothesis not only of Copernicus but also of Tycho Brahe, whereof either hypotheses are today publicly accepted as most true, and the Ptolemaic as outmoded. I commence a sacred discourse, a most true hymn to God the Founder, and I judge it to be piety, not to sacrifice many hecatombs of bulls to Him and to burn incense of innumerable perfumes and cassia, but first to learn myself, and afterwards to teach others too, how great He is in wisdom, how great in power, and of what sort in goodness. For to wish to adorn in every way possible the things that should receive adornment and to envy no thing its goods — this I put down as the sign of the greatest goodness, and in this respect I praise Him as good that in the heights of His wisdom He finds everything whereby each thing may be adorned to the utmost and that He can do by his unconquerable power all that he has decreed.

146 pages, Paperback

Published December 26, 2022

About the author

Johannes 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).

Reviews

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a large accomplishment, much like Kepler's Astronomia Nova. In this work, Kepler posits a divine accordance of arrangement of the only five regular solids that exist: The cube, which houses the tetrahedron, which houses the dodecahedron, which houses the icosahedron, and the finally which houses the octahedron. This ordering gives us an inclination of the relation of the different planets as they exist and their overall orbital speeds. Unfortunately, some of what Kepler posits in this book is not correct: but determining the planetary disctances by the ordering of geometrical figures was actually not incorrect. The relations of how far away Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury were from the Sun were absolutely correct in their entirety, and they are based on the ordering of these primary figures. Kepler even points out the variance of the mean speeds of movements, leading to the development of Kepler's third law: that the distances of the planets are to each other in an inverse relation as the mean speeds of the planets (to the 3/2 power).

Here is such an accomplished work, that he ends it by exhorting God, the creator of the universe, and in addition adds that the planets, the orbital speeds, and the things on the different planets were created by God himself for a reason. This is an incredibly important understanding and more people this day and age, especially if they are religious, should hold. If God created us, for instance, they would have also created extraterrestrial aliens. That has to be recognized. Amazing work.