Tycho Brahe

The Danish aristocrat and astronomer Tycho Brahe personified the inventive vitality of Renaissance life in the sixteenth century. Brahe lost his nose in a student duel, wrote Latin poetry, and built one of the most astonishing villas of the late Renaissance, while virtually inventing team research and establishing the fundamental rules of empirical science. His observatory at Uraniborg functioned as a satellite to Hamlet’s castle of Kronborg until Tycho abandoned it to end his days at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. This illustrated biography presents a new and dynamic view of Tycho’s life, reassessing his gradual separation of astrology from astronomy and his key relationships with Johannes Kepler, his sister Sophie, and his kinsmen at the court of King Frederick II.

Tycho Brahe was an eccentric Danish astronomer in the 1500s. Growing up in the wealthy home of his uncle, he was provided with the freedom to pursue his ambitions in life. While attending college, Tycho viewed a solar eclipse, which scholars had predicted would happen. He was fascinated that science could predict such phenomenal events, and he devoted much of his time to studying the heavens. Using modern instruments and techniques to measure the positions of the stars and the movements of the planets, Brahe revolutionized the way astronomers viewed the night sky.

The Lord of Uraniborg is a comprehensive biography of Tycho Brahe, father of modern astronomy, famed alchemist and littérateur of the sixteenth-century Danish Renaissance. Written in a lively and engaging style, Victor Thoren's biography offers interesting perspectives on Tycho's life and presents alternative analyses of virtually every aspect of his scientific work. A range of readers interested in astronomy, history of astronomy and the history of science will find this book fascinating.

Presents the life and work of the famous sixteenth-century Danish astronomer.

Though best known for his editing and posthumous publication of his friend Franz Kafka's writing, Max Brod was a major novelist in his own right. Tycho Brahe's Path to God, widely considered his finest work and viewed by many as a small masterpiece, concerns the relationship between the great Danish astronomer and the younger, intellectually superior Johannes Kepler. Brod's representation of this complicated relation grew out of his acquaintance with the young Albert Einstein, reproduces his struggles with the Expressionist poet Franz Werfel, and strangely anticipates the most famous act Brod would ever perform: publishing Kafka's writings without his permission. As Brahe attempts to create a diplomatic compromise between the old Ptolemaic system of planetary motion and its modern, Copernican revision, Kepler discards the principle of compromise root and branch. Their conflict thus becomes an emblem of the struggle between a weakened tradition and a self-conscious modernity. The novel manages to convey the intimate, emotional reality of a seventeenth-century political conflict as well as the psychological, political, and artistic turmoil of Brod's own time. This revival of the richly allusive and deeply resonant Tycho Brahe's Path to God is a true literary event.

Heavenly Intrigue is the fascinating, true account of the seventeenth-century collaboration between Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe that revolutionized our understanding of the universe–and ended in murder.One of history’s greatest geniuses, Kepler laid the foundations of modern physics with his revolutionary laws of planetary motion. But his beautiful mind was beset by demons. Born into poverty and abuse, half-blinded by smallpox, he festered with rage, resentment, and a longing for worldly fame. Brahe, his mentor, was a flamboyant aristocrat who had spent forty years mapping the heavens with unprecedented accuracy–but he refused to share his data with Kepler. With Brahe’s untimely death in Prague in 1601, rumors flew across Europe that he had been murdered. But it took twentieth-century forensics to uncover the poison in his remains, and the detective work of Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder to identify the prime suspect–the ambitious, envy-ridden Kepler himself. A fast-paced, true-life account that reads like a thriller, Heavenly Intrigue is a remarkable feat of historical re-creation.

Presents the life and work of the famous sixteenth-century Danish astronomer.