The music of the spheres
Johannes Kepler lived at the same time as Galileo, and shared his interest in planetary motion. His contributions to the field were significant enough for NASA to name its first planet-hunting space telescope after him. But while Galileo had the materialistic viewpoint of a modern scientist – and famously got into conflict with the Church – Kepler saw things in a completely different way.
From 1601 to 1612 his official position was Imperial Mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II – which sounds scientific enough, until you recall Rudolf’s obsession with the occult (he was also a patron of Edward Kelley and John Dee). For Kepler, there was no incompatibility between the scientific and the mystical, as his biographer David Love writes: “These two aspects of his work were always an integrated whole… he was taking a single unified approach to nature, which he saw as the creation of a mathematically motivated deity.” 1
This comes across as clearly as anywhere in Kepler’s work on the “music of the spheres”. Even in his own time this was
