Johannes Kepler certainly lived in interesting times in the sense of the old Chinese curse. Born 27th December 1571 he lived through the most intensive phase of the Counter-Reformation being forced, as a Protestant living and working in Catholic territory, to abandoned his home and livelihood more than once. Trained as a Luther priest he served three Catholic Holy Roman Kaisers as mathematicus and the supreme commander of the Catholic forces in the thirty years war as an astrologus. Always walking along a knife-edge. The last twelve years of his life were dominated by that most devastating of European wars. He played a very central role in one of the greatest upheavals in the history of astronomy as well as redefining the science of physical optics. He lost his first wife and several of his children to sickness and was chronically and oft acutely ill all of his life. Paid at best on an irregular basis by his various employers he was often in desperate need of money. He also lived during the highpoint of the European witch craze in which tens of thousands of innocent people, mostly women, were persecuted, tortured and murdered and must experience how his own mother was tried for practicing witchcraft. [want to know more?]
Filed under: Book Reviews, History
