So in 1579 the family leased the tavern “Zur Sonne” (“The Sun”) in Elmerdingen near Pforzheim.įig. However, because of an incautious bail he had lost his house and estate. Once again Kepler’s father returned to Leonberg. This experience had an important impact on his life because it started his passion for astronomy. So in 1577 Kepler’s mother showed him the year’s comet. By the way, the erratic way of living of Kepler’s father was a reason why his mother strongly influenced him when he was a boy. But his father did not stay longtime at Leonberg – after one year he went away to the Netherlands again. With the money earned in the war they bought a house there. In 1575 his parents returned from the Netherlands and the family moved to Leonberg (because Katharina did not get along with her parents-in-law). Kepler was a sickly child and at the age of six years he almost died because of smallpox, which left a detriment of his eyes behind. Finally, Kepler’s mother Katharina followed her husband and the grandparents took care of the child. Before he was one year old, his father left the family to fight for the Dutch Duke. Johannes Kepler was born as the first child of Heinrich and Katharina Kepler on Decemin Weil der Stadt near Stuttgart (in Württemberg, Germany). But contrary to Kopernikus, Kepler’s life was far from being peaceful and poor in events. He saw his studies about universal features as his Christian duty and its fulfillment to understand the Universe that God had created. Like Nikolaus Kopernikus (1473-1543), whose work inspired him, Kepler was a very religious man. Eventually this resulted in the acceptance of the heliocentric theory of the planetary system. By his passion for accurate measurements he got so involved in his astronomical research that he worked out the most precise astronomical indexes of his time. Although his scientific discoveries are very important, he never fulfilled his biggest wish namely to become a Protestant pastor.Īs Stephen Hawking (born 1942) mentioned: If there had been a prize for the man who struggled for the highest exactness in his work, it should have been awarded to Kepler. in “Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena” about optics). Therefore religious as well as scientific thoughts can be found in one and the same work of Johannes Kepler (e. In his time a career in these two fields was not that astonishing as it seems for us nowadays – because the view of the world was not yet separated into a religious and a scientific one. Johannes Kepler was both a scientist and a religious man. In his life he worked on both sides, but what earned him eternal fame are his three laws of planetary motion. In western science Johannes Kepler was the turning point from a magical-alchemistic to a rational-mathematical conception of the laws of nature.
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