Tycho Brahe Charts the Planets

We can see Tycho Brahe of Denmark as the man who kicked off the 100 year sprint to a scientific understanding of the cosmos culminating in Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687. Brahe collected a mountain of the most reliable astronomical observation data ever produced without the aid of the telescope by designing and manufacturing observatory instruments of unprecedented precision – and then employing them in a large, well-staffed and long running “data factory” financed by the Kind of Denmark, including use of his own private island for the construction of his observatory.

Brahe was a medieval wild man with the least conventional of childhoods who, among other things, had his nose cut off in a duel fought over who was the better mathematician. (Brahe thereafter wore a brass nose held on by paste.). 

He used his massive stock of observations to construct a more successful model of the cosmos that more accurately predicted the motions of the planets. Living as he did between the publication of Copernicus’ heliocentric thesis and Galileo’s telescope observations and promotion of Copernicus, Brahe did not accept the sun-centered thesis. His model was a kind of complex hybrid that more closely resembled the Ptolemaic model. But Brahe’s data lead directly to Kepler’s contribution and on to Newton’s achievement in 1687. 

Two things about Brahe are especially worth noting. First, data collection in itself can be a complex, demanding, long term commitment without which insight and inference are ultimately just speculation. Even though Brahe did not crack the geometry code of the visible universe himself, his data can truly be said to have opened the gate. Second, Brahe’s rejection of the Copernican model helps remind us that correct ideas do not automatically meet acceptance from the best and brightest. Copernicus had neither Brahe’s mass of data nor Kepler’s insightful analysis of that data when he made his proposal, so political and other leaders did not flock to his defense for many years. If not for the efforts of Galileo, it may be that Copernicus would not have eventually gotten the credit he deserved.