Kepler

He was not finished yet, not by a long way. In the Mysterium he had asked what is the co

It seemed a nothing, the merest trifle. It sat on the page with no more remarkable an air than if it had been, why, anything, a footnote in Euclid, one of Galileo's anagrams, a scrap of nonsense out of a schoolboy's bad dream, and yet it was the third of his eternal laws, and the supporting bridge between the harmonic ratios and the regular solids. It said that the squares of the periods of evolution of any two planets are to each other as the cubes of their mean distances from the sun. It was his triumph. It showed him that the discrepancies in distance which were left over after the insertion of the regular polygons between the orbits of the planets were not a defect of his calculations, but the necessary consequences of the dominant principle of harmony. The world, he understood at last, is an infinitely more complex and subtle construct than he or anyone else had imagined. He had listened for a tune, but here were symphonies. How mistaken he had been to seek a geometrically perfected, closed cosmos! A mere clockwork could be nothing beside the reality, which is the most harmonic possible. The regular solids are material, but harmony is form. The solids describe the raw masses, harmony prescribes the fine structure, by which the whole becomes that which it is, a perfected work of art.

Two weeks after the formulation of that law the book was finished. He set about the printing at once, in a kind of panic, as if fire or flood, his greatest fears, or some other hobgoblin, might strike him down before he could make public his testament. Besides, the printing was a kind of work, and how could he simply stop? The trajectory he had long ago entered on would take time to run down, would sweep him through further books, the scrag-ends of his career. And even if he had been capable of rest, rest was not permissible, for then he would have had to face, in the dreadful stillness, the demon that has started up at his back, whose hot breath was on his neck.

For years the World Harmony had obsessed him, a huge weight pi

 her and far less inviting precipices appeared under his feet. The world that once had seemed so wide was becoming narrower daily. The Palatinate's army had been crushed in the battle of Weisser Berg and Bohemia regained by the Catholics, but the war of the religions still raged. The Empire was ablaze and he was on the topmost storey. He could hear the flames roaring behind him, the crash of masonry and splintering timber as another staircase gave way. Before him there was only the shivered window and the sudden chill blue air. When in the autumn of 1619 the Elector Frederick and his wife Princess Elizabeth entered Prague to accept the crown offered him by the Bohemian Protestants, the World Harmony had been on the presses, and Kepler had had time to suppress only in a few final copies the dedication to James of England, the Princess's father. He had not needed that co

Presently, as he knew it would, the old wheel turned: all Lutherans were ordered out of Linz. As the Emperor's mathematician, in title at least, Kepler could hope for immunity. He gave up his pilgrimages to Wincklema

The public turmoil was matched in the darkness of his heart, where a private war was raging. He could not tell what was the cause of battle, nor what the prize that was being fought for. On one side was all that he held precious, his work, his love for wife and children, his peace of mind; on the other was that which he could not name, a drunken faceless power. Was it still, he wondered, the demon that had risen up out of the closing pages of the Harmonia mundi, grown fat on the world's misfortunes? That was when he began to suspect a co

He used as excuse the moneys owed him by the crown. The printing of the Tables would be a costly business. He set out for Vie

When he got to Linz he found the city transformed into a military camp. The Bavarian garrison sent in by the Emperor was billeted everywhere. At Plank the printer's a squad of soldiers was sprawled at feed among the presses, their stink overlaying the familiar smells of ink and machine oil. All work had stopped. They watched him incuriously as he danced before them in helpless rage. He might have dropped into their midst from another planet. They were for the most part the sons of poor farmers. When the printing got under way at last they began to display a childlike interest in the work: few of them had ever seen a machine working before. They would gather about Plank's men in silent groups, staring and softly breathing like cattle at a stile. The sudden white flourish of a pulled proof never failed to call forth a collective sigh of surprise and pleasure. Later on, when the amazing fact had soaked into their understanding that Kepler was the sole cause of all this mighty effort, they turned their awed attention on to him. They would jostle to get near him at the benches or the readers' desk, trying to sift out of his talk of fonts and colophons and faces some clue to the secret of his wizardry. And occasionally they would pluck up courage enough to offer him a mug ofbeer or a twist of tobacco, gri