Tycho Brahe: Noize as Fuck

-- Ian c=====8 (johni72...), August 4th, 2004.

Tycho's nose was cut off in a swordfight, hence the copper/silver/whatever nose.

Kepler trumps them all, though.

Newton was fairly noise too. In the twenty years between inventing calculus and publishing his theory of gravity, he concentrated on theology and alchemy. Nobody really gives a crap about his god rants and his experiments involved mixing all sorts of chemicals together, drinking the contents, and recording the effects they had on him. He became a bit insane from about 1710 onward, at the time people just thought he was old but we now know that it was due to acute mercury poisoning from his chemistry experiments.

Newton also holds the all-time record as the world's oldest virgin. Not cool. I'm sure there have been older virgins at some point in human history, but their lives aren't well-documented like Newton's is so that can't be confirmed.

i am trying to get funding for a 6 week astronomy summer school program where the kids do everything on maps - first they'll draw the earth's orbit on a big sheet of graph paper. then, they'll find earth's position at a bunch of different days of the year (by using arc measure, 1 whole circumference = 365 days). then i hand out a bunch of dated photos of mars from observatories and they find the inclination of mars. they draw out mars' orbit and then they draw rays from the earth at the right inclination to get the position of mars. then they can select a couple of intervals, draw big triangles, calculate areas and confirm kepler's laws for themselves!!

Koestler wasn't exactly known for being the most thorough researcher. I think the Kepler section contained most of the book's original research, he probably took some liberties there. If there's one thing Koestler knew how to do, it was overstate his case.

vahid: did we? I don't remember it.

yeah!

defend the indefensible: religious fundamentalists

Vahid yelled at me for calling Tycho an engineer, I have to reread the thread to remember what that was all about.

xpost beat me to it.

Tycho died on October 24, 1601, several days after straining his bladder during a banquet. It had been said that to leave the banquet before it concluded would be the height of bad manners, and so he remained. His weakened state allowed an infection to invade his body and led ultimately to his death.

That thread is somewhat unique -- we hit upon a magic combination of posters who were able to talk intelligently about science without 84903 other ILXors hijacking the thread to talk about how useless their psych and philosophy degrees are.

DON'T BREAK THE SEAL

lolz@barry

My high school physics teacher really liked astronomy. On the first day of grade 12 (that is the first year we take physics in Ontario so this was literally our intro to physics) he had us out in the yard with telescopes mapping sunspots in polar coordinates and calculating the siderial period of the sun and shit. This unit went on for about three weeks. Everybody hated it because that stuff was mad difficult and nobody had ever heard of such a thing on the curriculum before. The teacher also wanted to weed out people from his "advanced" course and keep the hard-workers who might actually be interested in physics.

Anyway, with students who have shown a prior interest in this stuff (not unsuspecting grade 12 students like we were), Vahid's proposed summer program would be a hell of a lot of fun.

http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lp4vyvDJFx1qa4bqdo1_500.png

Tycho's elk

Pierre Gassendi wrote that Tycho also had a tame elk (moose) and that his mentor the Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel (Hesse-Cassel) asked whether there was an animal faster than a deer.[15] Tycho replied, writing that there was none, but he could send his tame elk. When Wilhelm replied he would accept one in exchange for a horse, Tycho replied with the sad news that the elk had just died on a visit to entertain a nobleman at Landskrona. Apparently during dinner[23] the elk had drunk a lot of beer, fallen down the stairs, and died.[15][24]