Dimensions
144 x 225 x 37mm
The Strange Partnership that Revolutionised Science.
When Newton famously said, "I have stood on the shoulders of giants", two of the greatest of those giants were Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. The tale of these extraordinary men, and the enormous contribution they made to our understanding of astronomy, is one of the strangest stories in scientific history.
Neither man would have been a giant without the other: the work of either alone would almost certainly have remained no more than a historical curiosity. More remarkably still, each man only reached the right destination by following a path he though was leading somewhere else entirely. While Kepler and Brahe muddled their way to discovery, the future of human knowledge hung in the balance.
Set in one of the most turbulent and colourful eras in European history, when medieval gave way to modern, this book relates the stories of these two eccentric men: Kepler, the devout and poverty-stricken teacher, whose astronomical theories seem bizarre, even quite mad, to modern minds but whose mathematical abilities were second to none, and Brahe, the arrogant, extravagant aristocrat, who believed the Sun orbited the Earth, but possessed the best astronomical observations of the time.
In this brilliant, highly original double biography, Kitty Ferguson describes the fateful meeting in Prague in 1600 which led to the two men's tumultuous alliance and the resulting leap forward in scientific understanding.
