Kepler was unconsoled by the decree—perhaps he knew that policy change and cultural change are hardly the same thing, existing on different time scales. He spent the remaining years of his life obsessively annotating The Dream with two hundred twenty-three footnotes—a volume of hypertext equal to the story itself—intended to dispel superstitious interpretations by delineating his exact scientific reasons for using the symbols and metaphors he did. In his ninety-sixth footnote, Kepler plainly stated “the hypothesis of the whole dream”: “an argument for the motion of the Earth, or rather a
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