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Max Caspar (1880–1956)

Autor(a) de Kepler

1 Work 78 Membros 3 Críticas

Obras por Max Caspar

Kepler (1959) 78 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
1880
Data de falecimento
1956
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
Germany
Ocupações
editor
translator

Membros

Críticas

INTRODUCTION
Despite the occasionally awkward sentence structure, this is an enthralling book. Modern science was born in the midst of the trauma of religious conflict in 17th century Europe. Max Casper’s finely detailed portrait of Johannes Kepler captures both the scientific stature of the man and the violence of the historical backdrop. It would be hard to conceive of a more authoritative biographer. Max Casper studied mathematics and theology at Tubingen (1900-1904). Three centuries earlier that is where Kepler had studied (1589-1594). Casper was also a consummate mathematician, studying at Gottingen (when David Hilbert and Felix Klein were at the institution). From 1934 onwards he was editor of the Collected Works of Johannes Kepler. Max Casper’s great achievement is to give a balanced account of the religious, cosmological and scientific preoccupations that dominated Kepler’s life. The science cannot be understood without the religion and cosmology.

RELIGION
Kepler was a genuinely pious individual. So, it would appear, was Max Casper. He treats Kepler’s religious scruples with a degree of empathy that goes beyond mere historical impartiality. In this case that is an advantage. Deeply-felt, personal religious struggles were a fundamental part of Kepler’s life. This led to continual friction with ecclesiastical authorities. Kepler was comfortable with the use of the work “catholic” to describe the historic community of Christians. In Prague (where he was Imperial mathematician 1600-1612) this led to false hopes for the catholic party and equally fallacious suspicions on the part of the evangelicals. Although he abhorred the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, he was sympathetic to the Calvinist interpretation of the Eucharist. When he took up his position as district mathematician in Linz (1612-1626) he fell afoul of the Württemberg consistory over some minor doctrinal issue and was excluded from the communion. The man who was a passionate believer in freedom of conscience was thus able to alienate Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics alike. Max Casper enters into the details of these theological struggles with such sincerity that you are transported into the 17th century. This biography could equally be read as an introduction to the Thirty Years’ war.

MYSTICAL COSMOLOGY
Today the 3 planetary laws are presented in uncluttered positivist garb. For Kepler, by contrast, they were the crowning achievement of a deeply mystical cosmology. Max Casper’s detailed and sympathetic treatment of that cosmology allows the reader to enter into the spirit of Kepler’s thought. The first appearance of the cosmology was the Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). This was the agenda for Kepler’s life. At the root of this cosmology was a belief in harmony which had its intellectual roots in Pythagoranism and Platonism. Here is Casper describing the Harmonice Mundi (1619): “He is a follower of Plato, according to whose theory the human mind learns all mathematical ideas and figures, all axioms, all solutions about these things out of itself…As chief witness for his view Kepler, in this connection, draws on Proclus, from whose commentary on Euclid he cites long passages.” (270). The entire scheme is infused with Christian piety as the harmony of the universe is an expression of divinity. “God does not play dice” is the modern agnostic equivalent.

SCIENCE
Of course, Kepler is known primarily as the father of modern astronomy. The three planetary laws have become a staple in every undergraduate course in mechanics and calculus. One of Max Casper’s many achievements is that he is able to describe the planetary laws without introducing any equations or geometrical proofs. The first two laws (planetary orbits are ellipses and the equal time equal area law) were first published in the Astronomia Nova in 1609. Casper vividly conveys the Herculean task of deriving the laws through innumerable brute force calculationsbased on Tycho Brahe’s observations. Kepler was literally working as a human computer, crunching the numbers that a century later could be analyzed more simply with calculus. The 3rd law (the square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the mean distance) was announced in the Harmonice Mundi (1619). Although Galileo is the best remembered polemical defender of Copernicanism, he was still a proponent of circular orbits and kinematic explanations. Ironically, it was Kepler’s mystical cosmology that gave him the insight that laid the basis for celestial mechanics: the “vis motoria” of the sun was the force that drove the elliptical orbits and explained the planetary laws. It is easy to see the “vis motoria” as a precursor of the concept of gravity. Besides giving an excellent account of the genesis of the planetary laws, Max Casper also describes many of Kepler’s other scientific achievements. These include his work on optics (Astronomia par optica 1604 and Dioptrice 1611).

Besides the theoretical insights that laid the foundations of celestial mechanics and optics, Kepler made great contributions to collection and publication of volumes of astronomical data. This included the publication of numerous volumes of Ephemerides. The task that we was entrusted with when Tycho Brahe died was finally discharged in 1627 with the publication of the Rudolphine Tables. Casper’s description of the printing of the Rudolphine tables is a brilliant vignette of publishing in the 17th century: finding suitable paper, arguments with the printer, developing fonts and, finally, finding a bookseller.

Conclusion
As in the case of Isaac Newton, the birth of modern science was deeply entangled with concerns that appear quite alien to the 21st century. Max Casper’s own words capture these dichotomies well: “Thus old and new, mechanistic and animistic considerations, causal and teleological principles, Platonic speculations and scholastic abstractions are interwoven into a fascinating picture that contains and combines everything created by previous astronomers, but besides, striding far ahead of all, announces a new scientific style”
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
fernig | 2 outras críticas | Sep 10, 2014 |
If I'm not mistaken this is, despite its age, still the standard biography of Kepler. There is a lot of information here -- perhaps more detail than a casual reader might want.

Caspar's biography is solid ... indeed it has a kind of, er, Germanic blockiness to it, call it a heft, or a heaviness. It sort of drones in your mental ears, but not in a bad way.

In the end, though, I feel this book has a major problem: it is too uncritical. Kepler is obviously very important to Caspar (let's face it: Kepler is very important, period -- that's why we read this book), and this seems to have robbed the author of the necessary objectivity. Caspar gushes. Kepler, it seems, could do no wrong: if he had a failing, it was that he tended to get overexcited. Although the portrait is very detailed, it is, somehow, not very complex, and is rather lacking in inner dimensions.

Caspar would also have done well to keep his own religious feelings in the background. It is all very well that Kepler's piety resonates with his own; however, here too it feels as if critical distance is wanting.

Still, there is a lot here you probably will have a hard time finding anywhere else -- and that counts.
… (mais)
1 vote
Assinalado
tungsten_peerts | 2 outras críticas | Apr 7, 2013 |
Price in pounds
 
Assinalado
ajapt | 2 outras críticas | Dec 30, 2018 |

Estatísticas

Obras
1
Membros
78
Popularidade
#229,022
Avaliação
4.2
Críticas
3
ISBN
3
Línguas
1

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