394. Best of Both Worlds: Tycho Brahe
Responses to Copernicus in the 16th century, culminating with the master of astral observation Tycho Brahe.
Themes:
• P. Barker and B.R. Goldstein, “Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy: a Reappraisal,” Perspctives on Science 6 (1999), 232-58.
• A. Blair, “Tycho Brahe’s Critique of Copernicus,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990), 355-77.
• J.R. Christianson, Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens (London: 2020).
• K. Ferguson, Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens (New York: 2002).
• K.J. Howell, “The Role of Biblical Interpretation in the Cosmology of Tycho Brahe,” Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Science 29 (1998), 515-37.
• C. Methuen, Kepler’s Tübingen. Stimulus to a Theological Mathematics (Aldershot: 1998).
• A. Mosley, Bearing the Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: 2011).
• V.E. Thoren and J.R. Christianson, The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe (Cambridge: 1990).
• R.S. Westman, “The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory,” Isis 66 (1975), 165-93.
Comments
Realism vs Instrumentalism
This was a remarkable episode. I’m trained in physics, and there’s a bit of a tendency in quantum mechanics to “shut up and calculate” and not think too deeply about the borderline incoherent physical picture underlying the math. Those who work on solving this are working on the so-called “interpretations of quantum mechanics”. But a lot of experimenters don’t care to think about this too much because they can predict things so well. While I have no idea if we will ever actually get the further observations needed to turn interpretations into testable hypotheses, I was pretty surprised to hear the “shut up and calculate” concerning heliocentrism! It really makes perfect sense though - before observations are better, even today we use vague ideas to select a model, that can vary from calculational ease to some notion of beauty (with the latter no longer being theologically tinged and still very much there, such as in the history of string theory’s development). That’s for the excellent work as always here.
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