Although other scientists are more famous for getting the astronomical idea of heliocentrism correct, Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) was much more successful than his peers at explaining super important aspects of our solar system (for instance, the planets go round the sun in ellipses). Who would have thought that a driving force behind his significant discoveries was a desire to know the mind of God? — and that one of his first works explored this in what he thought was an epiphany involving the relationship between three-dimensional shapes and the position of the planets? Kepler’s strengths lay in his mathematical abilities, and so when he realized that you could take the “perfect solids” — five shapes in which all sides are equivalent and match each other to make an enclosed shape (and yes, they do look like D&D dice) — and nestle them inside each other interspersed with spheres, you get a ratio that he thought matched the relative ratios of the planets going around the sun.
This, Kepler thought, was no accident, but an insight into Divine Workings! And “Paul is dead” is a secret message from “Revolution 9!” JK, neither are true. But both illustrate the ways that we humans are evolutionary programmed to find meaning. To Kepler’s amazing credit, the astronomer allowed the evidence he found to change his mind. When the math didn’t work out to prove his ideas correct, he studied harder, eventually coming up with the Three Laws of Planetary Motion that we still memorize (well, or hopefully have at least heard of) today.
Source(s): Image from Wikipedia, from Kepler’s 1597 _Mysterium Cosmographicum_. See Richard DeWitt, _Worldviews: an Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science_, third edition, Wiley Blackwell, 2018, pp. 132-135.
