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

by Arthur Koestler

The authority of the ancients did not rest on idolatry, but on the belief in the finite nature of knowledge.

The myopic child, who sometimes saw the world doubled or quadrupled, became the founder of modern optics (the word ‘dioptries’ on the oculist’s prescription is derived from the title of one of Kepler’s books); the man who could only see clearly at a short distance, invented the modern astronomical telescope. We shall have occasion to watch the working of this magic dynamo, which transforms pain into achievement and curses into blessings.

With his first calendar, Kepler was decidedly lucky. He had prophesied, among other things, a cold spell and an invasion by the Turks. Six months later he reported smugly to Michael Maestlin: By the way, so far the calendar’s predictions are proving correct. There is an unheard-of cold in our land. In the Alpine farms people die of the cold. It is reliably reported that when they arrive home and blow their noses, the noses fall off … As for the Turks, on 1 January they devastated the whole country from Vienna to Neustadt, setting everything on fire and carrying off men and plunder.13

We had the privilege of witnessing one of the rare recorded instances of a false inspiration, a supreme hoax of the Socratic daimon, the inner voice that speaks with such infallible, intuitive certainty to the deluded mind. That unforgettable moment before the figure on the blackboard carried the same inner conviction as Archimedes’ Eureka or Newton’s flash of insight about the falling apple.

in the twelfth, he alludes to the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres, searching for correlations between his perfect solids and the harmonic intervals in music – but it is merely one more arabesque to the dream.

This variation (or eccentricity) he accounted for by allotting to each planet a spherical shell of sufficient thickness to accommodate the oval orbit between its walls (see the model on p. 223). The inner wall represents the planet’s minimum distance from the sun, the outer wall its maximum distance. The

It would be difficult to over-estimate the revolutionary significance of this proposal. For the first time since antiquity, an attempt was made not only to describe heavenly motions in geometrical terms, but to assign them a physical cause. We have arrived at the point where astronomy and physics meet again, after a divorce which lasted for two thousand years. This reunion of the two halves of the split mind produced explosive results. It led to Kepler’s three Laws, the pillars on which Newton built the modern universe.

(ii) That such souls do not exist I have proved in my Astronomia Nova. (iii) If we substitute for the word ‘soul’ the word ‘force’ then we get just the principle which underlies my physics of the skies in the Astronomia Nova … For once I firmly believed that the motive force of a planet was a soul

force of the deity radiated from the centre of the world outward, until Aristotle banished the First Mover to the periphery of the universe. In the Copernican system, the sun again occupied the place of the Pythagorean Central Fire, but God remained outside, and the sun had neither divine attributes, nor any physical influence on the motions of the planets. In Kepler’s universe, all mystic attributes and physical powers are centralized in the sun, and the First Mover is returned to the focal position where he belongs. The visible universe is the symbol and ‘signature’ of the Holy Trinity: the sun represents the Father, the sphere of the fixed stars the Son, the invisible forces which, emanating from the Father, act through interstellar space, represent the Holy Ghost: The sun in the middle of the moving stars, himself at rest and yet the source of motion, carries the image of God the Father and Creator … He distributes his motive force through a medium which contains the moving bodies even as the Father creates through the Holy Ghost.

And thus are bodily things, thus are materia corporea represented in tertia quantatis specie trium dimensionum.20

Post factum, however, it is always difficult to appreciate the originality and imagination it required to ask a question which had not been asked before. In this respect, too, Kepler holds the record.

Thus a purely mystical inspiration was the root out of which the first rational theory of the dynamics of the universe developed, based on the secular trinity of Kepler’s laws.

Kepler, too, discovered his America, believing that it was India.

these figures pleased me because they are quantities, that is, something which existed before the skies. For quantities were created at the beginning, together with substance; but the sky was only created on the second day …26 The ideas of quantities have been and are in God from eternity, they are God himself;

The inspiration about the five perfect solids had come to Kepler when he was twenty-four, in July 1595. During the next six months he had worked feverishly on the Mysterium.