Kepler by Walter W. Bryant
page 15 of 58 (25%)
page 15 of 58 (25%)
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eager to visit him, a project which as we shall see was more than
fulfilled. Another copy of the book Kepler sent to Reymers the Imperial astronomer with a most fulsome letter, which Tycho, who asserted that Reymers had simply plagiarised his work, very strongly resented, thus drawing from Kepler a long letter of apology. About the same time Kepler had married a lady already twice widowed, and become involved in difficulties with her relatives on financial grounds, and with the Styrian authorities in connection with the religious disputes then coming to a head. On account of these latter he thought it expedient, the year after his marriage, to withdraw to Hungary, from whence he sent short treatises to Tübingen, "On the magnet" (following the ideas of Gilbert of Colchester), "On the cause of the obliquity of the ecliptic" and "On the Divine wisdom as shown in the Creation". His next important step makes it desirable to devote a chapter to a short notice of Tycho Brahe. [Footnote 2: Since the sum of the plane angles at a corner of a regular solid must be less than four right angles, it is easily seen that few regular solids are possible. Hexagonal faces are clearly impossible, or any polygonal faces with more than five sides. The possible forms are the dodecahedron with twelve pentagonal faces, three meeting at each corner; the cube, six square faces, three meeting at each corner; and three figures with triangular faces, the tetrahedron of four faces, three meeting at each corner; the octahedron of eight faces, four meeting at each corner; and the icosahedron of twenty faces, five meeting at each corner.] |
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