The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

by Arthur Koestler

In his quarrels with Tycho and constant naggings at him, he displayed embarrassing pettiness. Yet he was curiously devoid of jealousy or lasting resentment. He was proud of his discoveries and often boasted of them (particularly of those which turned out to be worthless), but he had no proprietary feeling about them; he was quite prepared to share the copyright of the three Laws with the Junker Tengnagel and, contrary to the habits of the time, gave in all his books most generous credit to others – to Maestlin, Brahe, Gilbert, and Galileo. He even gave credit where none was due, for instance to Fabricius, whom he nearly saddled with the honour of having discovered the elliptic orbits. He freely informed his correspondents of his latest researches and naïvely expected other astronomers to part with their jealously guarded observations; when they refused, as Tycho and his heirs did, he simply pinched the material without a qualm of conscience. He had, in fact, no sense of private property concerning scientific research. Such an attitude is most unusual among scholars in our day; in Kepler’s day it seemed quite insane.