So I recently came across a story that I thought was really wild, but also somewhat disturbing
and I wanted to share it with you.
It's about Johannes Kepler, but it's also about his elderly mother Katharina, the birth
of science fiction, and our reluctance to be open-minded.
Kepler was a great German astronomer from the 17th century, his name pops up in plenty
of textbooks today, for his laws of planetary motion.
He lived in an era where there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology.
But there was a strong division between astronomy and physics.
People thought that the planets moved by only the hand of God, Kepler himself wrote plenty
of horoscopes, but he also became the first person to combine the map of predicting eclipses
with a physical explanation.
He showed that the movements we can see can be explained by physical forces.
At this time, pretty much everyone believed incorrectly that the sun revolved around the
earth, and that the earth was the centre of the universe.
It's a fair enough belief because that's what it feels like.
So it's easy to see how an uneducated guess might go wrong.
But Kepler was an astronomer, and he was starting to realise that the evidence pointed towards
a very different conclusion, it pointed towards the heliocentric model presented by Copernicus,
where the sun is at the centre of the solar system, and we revolve around it.
Kepler was a university student when he learned about the Copernican theory, and he even wrote
his dissertation about it, but the uni kept it kind of hush.
Galileo later wrote to Kepler to confess that he was also a believer in the Copernican model,
but he hadn't dared to stand up for it in public yet, and he wouldn't for another 30
years.
You might have heard about how that ended up for Galileo.
He was tried before the Catholic Church and sentenced to spend the rest of his life under
house arrest.
It was in 1616, that an inquisition declared heliocentrism to be foolish and absurd, and
to contradict the Holy Scripture, they decided it was punishable by death.
At the same time as Galileo's trial, Kepler was rushing to try and save his mother, who
was facing a trial of her own for an equally if not more, hated crime, witchcraft.
But all of these events are somewhat connected in an unexpected way.
Years earlier, in 1609, Kepler had finished writing a book called Somnium, or The Dream,
it is often called one of if not the first example of science fiction writing, because
of how much hard science it contained.
Before I take a look at the story, I would like to quickly thank Audible for sponsoring
this video.
The story that I'm sharing today about Kepler is one that I read about in the first chapter
of the book Figuring by Maria Popova.
It is one of the most poetic retellings of scientific ideas and of the human search for
truth and meaning.
I've been listening to it on Audible, which is nice because I can listen to it in bed
before I fall asleep.
Audible has a huge library of audiobooks, but also podcasts, guided wellness programmes
and performances, pretty much anything spoken.
As a member, you get one credit every month to redeem for any title that you get to keep
forever, but they also now have the Plus catalogue.
So even if you've spent your credits, there are still thousands of titles included that
you can always download.
I'm happy to recommend Audible because it is something that I use already in my daily
life, so it makes a lot of sense for me to share it with you.
New members can always try Audible for free for 30 days.
And as we're approaching Christmas, there is also a limited time offer to save 60% on
your first three months, which works out only $5.95 a month, you can get that by going to
audible.com/tibees or for those in the US you can text tibees to 500 500.
So here's the story originally written in Latin.
It starts with Kepler falling asleep, and he has a dream in which he's reading a book.
In that book, we have the story of an Icelandic boy called Duracotus.
He's 14 years old and his mother makes a living selling mysterious bags of herbs with mystical
markings on them.
She sells them to ship captains for good luck.
One day Duracotus cuts open one of the bags to see what's inside and spills the contents
out everywhere.
His mother is really angry with this because it loses her money.
So instead she agrees to give her son to the skipper in place of one of the bags, and they
take off together and sail to Norway.
On the ocean voyage Duracotus becomes seasick and so the captain leaves him behind on land
with instructions to go and deliver something to the astronomer Tycho Brahe.
Duracotus ends up becoming a student of the astronomer and spends five years in his care
learning how to observe the heavens.
Take this drawing with a grain of salt because this book was actually written before Galileo
pointed the first spyglass at the sky, and before Kepler himself had ever looked through
a telescope.
After a few years Duracotus travels back to Iceland to meet up with his mother, she's
happy to hear that he has studied astronomy and reveals that she too possesses lots of
knowledge on this topic.
But then she reveals that the reason she has this knowledge is because she is able to summon
up these spirits or daemons, which can move her anywhere on Earth in an instant.
It turns out this doesn't just include the Earth though because she summons one of her
favourite spirits to speak with them.
The spirit tells them that 50,000 miles up in the Aether lies the island of Levania,
which is Earth's moon, the spirits are able to take humans up to the moon in a journey
of four hours.
Apparently, the journey is a shock to humans, so they are sedated with drugs for the trip.
The spirit describes a trip to the moon and also talks a lot about the Earth, which is
called Volva.
The name is picked carefully to represent revolution or revolving.
As for the inhabitants of the moon, they believe that the Earth rotates around the moon.
Volva goes through the same phases that we see the moon go through.
The moon Levania is also divided into two hemispheres.
One is called Privolva, which never sees the Earth, it is the side of the moon that is
always locked facing away from us.
And the other hemisphere is Subvolva, which does see the Earth as their moon.
A lot of the book is then a very detailed scientific description of how the Earth would
look from the moon, how eclipses would look, the size and orbits of planets, and even some
descriptions of creatures that inhabit the moon.
Now at the time this was written the idea that the moon revolved around the Earth was
actually well known and noncontroversial.
Kepler is trying to suggest that perhaps our own certainty about Earth's fixed position
in space with regards to the sun is just as misguided as the lunar citizens belief that
the Earth revolves around them.
When you're standing on the moon, and the ground feels firm and motionless beneath your
feet, and you see this pale blue dot of the Earth rising and setting against your horizon,
you can really be convinced in something that's not true.
The story was written 300 years before Edwin Abbott's Flatland, and in that book, we are
exposed to creatures that live in one dimensional and two dimensional spaces, and we see how
it is utterly impossible to convince them that there exists a third dimension.
In Flatland, the reader is left questioning whether there must be some obvious fourth
dimension, that we are also incapable of comprehending.
Kepler hoped that by seeing the absurdity of the lunar people's belief that the moon
was at the centre of the universe, that we ourselves would have the insight to question
whether that was true for us as well.
He wanted to gently expose more people to Copernicus's theory of the solar system, but
he knew it would be too complex and abstract to just present the scientific facts to a
largely scientifically illiterate public.
Instead, he knew that storytelling was an amazing way to share science, that still remains
true today.
Kepler perhaps knew that "The universe is made of stories, not atoms."
It's quite convoluted how Kepler presents the events as being within a book within a
dream.
And it creates quite a lot of distance between Kepler and what he's writing down.
Perhaps that is deliberate as a way to be able to deny and say that these are not necessarily
things that he believes.
The old fashioned 'retweets are not endorsements'.
It was called The Dream, but the story was supposed to awaken people to a new scientific
truth.
However, it turned out their society was in a slumber too deep to be helped.
Sometime in 1611, the manuscript got leaked, but the science and symbolism were lost on
the illiterate, superstitious and vengeful villages of Kepler's hometown.
It was taken to be more of an autobiography since there were a few facts hard to ignore.
It was well known that Kepler himself had been an apprentice of Tycho Brahe and Kepler's
mother was a herb doctor, just like the mother figure in the story.
So when their fictional mother character conjoined up spirits to travel to the moon, that was
taken literally.
So apparently a local woman who was already angry at Katharina over a private matter,
heard of the book and used it as ammunition to convince 24 others in the town to testify
that Katharina was a witch.
These accounts were as random as a man dating the onset of his disability to a night 10
years earlier when he had taken a single sip from a cup at Katharina's house.
Kepler took on his mother's legal defence and dedicated six years of his life to disproving
each of these allegations, using science to point to natural causes behind each one.
But his mother was arrested and taken from her home in the middle of the night.
The accounts I've read and say that the dream wasn't presented as evidence at the trial,
but Kepler did hold himself at least partially responsible for her fate having written it.
Katharina was imprisoned for 14 months and threatened with torture but confessed nothing.
Eventually she was released but never recovered and died not long after.
Kepler spent the rest of his life obsessively annotating the dream with 223 footnotes, as
long as the story itself, his intention was to dispel superstitious interpretations by
giving his exact scientific reasons for using each symbol and metaphor.
He says in footnote number eight, "if any of you have read this little book before,
you will understand what forebodings this book brought me".
He says, "These words were taken up by senseless spirits and finally burned forth into rumour,
blown up by ignorance and inexperience."
He takes particular care with describing the spirits in the book, and in footnote 34 he
says that they are the spirits of science, to whom the causes of things are known.
There are nine of them, metaphysics, physics, ethics, astronomy, astrology, optics, music,
geometry and arithmetic.
He also talks about his ideas of gravity.
And keep in mind this is before Newton is even born.
Footnote 66 says, "I define gravity as a power similar to magnetic force and mutual attraction.
The force of this attraction is greater in bodies close to each other, rather than in
those that are remote.
As a consequence, they rather resist separation from one another when they are still close
to each other."
In the very next footnote, he demonstrates an intuitive understanding of inertia.
Again, this is before Newton would pen it down in one of his laws.
Kepler says "because bodies are heavy, they resist motion."
Kepler tried to publish the dream in 1629, but he ran out of money.
He travelled 100 kilometres on a horse to repay debts and try to sell his assets to
finish printing the book.
But on his journey, he came down with an illness and died in 1630.
The Dream was published in 1634 by Kepler's son Ludwig.
For Kepler, it seems that his search for truth came at a great personal cost.
The idea that the earth was not the centre of the universe was the first major challenge
to our self-importance, and each challenge since has faced similar resistance.
300 years later, we would use Kepler's laws to calculate a trajectory to the moon and
land there, allowing Kepler's Dream to come true.
Thanks for watching this video and thanks to my Patreon supporters for making it possible.
A special shout out to today's Patron Cat of the Day, Jojo.