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Last night I was reading about platonic solids and German mathematician Johannes Kepler’s The Harmony of the World (1619).

Then, after consulting college notes and MB, I made this Illustrator Sketch #5.2, ‘Beautiful Simple in Carolina Blue:’

According to Chapter 6 of I. Bernard Cohen’s book The Birth of a New Physics, “Kepler was a tortured mystic.” Did you know?

But sure, it must take a bit of craziness to stare at data sets for a quarter of a century to suddenly make this leap of logic that:

Hey! The physics of the planets must be related to Plato’s perfect polyhedra!

They are. There are patterns that can be translated into mathematical equations that are clean, quite beautiful and most of all simple. They’re proportions. Mathematical ratios that describe the ways the planets move. How fast they go. The ellipses they trace. Time, distance, space, movement. It’s all there, and the truth of it started as a nugget of a hunch in Kepler’s head.

Galileo, who didn’t like the idea of forces acting from a distance on the earth or any part of the earth, said this of Kepler:

But among all the great men who have philosophized about this remarkable effect (lunar force might be the cause of tides), I am more astonished at Kepler than any other. Despite his open and acute mind, and though he has at his fingertips the motions attributed to the earth, he has nevertheless lent his ear and his assent to the moon’s dominion over the waters, and to occult properties, and to such puerilities. –Galileo

Imagine!

Of Galileo, Queen said this:

Galileo, Galileo figaro Magnifico / I’m just a poor boy and nobody loves me.
He’s just a poor boy from a poor family/ Spare him his life from this monstrosity.-Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody

And!…. Here are Kepler’s three laws:

1. The orbit of each planet is the shape of an ellipse with the sun located at one focus.
2. In any equal time intervals, a line from the planet to the sun will sweep out equal areas.
3. The squares of the times of revolution of any two planets around the sun (earth included) are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun.

For further reading, see this page with diagrams of eccentric orbits.

I and Thou and a bit on Newton’s Law