The Astronomer & the Witch

The Astronomer & the Witch PDF Author: Ulinka Rublack
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198736770
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In The Astronomer and the Witch, Ulinka Rublack pieces together the tale of this extraordinary episode in Kepler's life, one that takes us to the heart of his changing world.

The Astronomer & the Witch

The Astronomer & the Witch PDF Author: Ulinka Rublack
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198736770
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In The Astronomer and the Witch, Ulinka Rublack pieces together the tale of this extraordinary episode in Kepler's life, one that takes us to the heart of his changing world.

Kepler's Witch

Kepler's Witch PDF Author: James A. Connor
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061737429
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
Set against the backdrop of the witchcraft trial of his mother, this lively biography of Johannes Kepler – 'the Protestant Galileo' and 16th century mathematician and astronomer – reveals the surprisingly spiritual nature of the quest of early modern science. In the style of Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, Connor's book brings to life the tidal forces of Reformation, Counter–Reformation, and social upheaval. Johannes Kepler, who discovered the three basic laws of planetary motion, was persecuted for his support of the Copernican system. After a neighbour accused his mother of witchcraft, Kepler quit his post as the Imperial mathematician to defend her. James Connor tells Kepler's story as a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey into the modern world through war and disease and terrible injustice, a journey reflected in the evolution of Kepler's geometrical model of the cosmos into a musical model, harmony into greater harmony. The leitmotif of the witch trial adds a third dimension to Kepler's biography by setting his personal life within his own times. The acts of this trial, including Kepler's letters and the accounts of the witnesses, although published in their original German dialects, had never before been translated into English. Echoing some of Dava Sobel's work for Galileo's Daughter, Connor has translated the witch trial documents into English. With a great respect for the history of these times and the life of this man, Connor's accessible story illuminates the life of Kepler, the man of science, but also Kepler, a man of uncommon faith and vision.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch PDF Author: Rivka Galchen
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374711216
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which award-winning author Rivka Galchen’s writing is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a tale for our time—the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear. The year is 1619, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katherina Kepler is accused of being a witch. An illiterate widow, Katherina is known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It’s enough to make anyone jealous, and Katherina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone’s business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katherina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katherina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katherina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katherina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets. Provocative and entertaining, Galchen’s bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society, and a family, undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

Look Up!

Look Up! PDF Author: Robert Burleigh
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442481102
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
Henrietta Levitt was the first person to discover the scientific importance of a star’s brightness—so why has no one heard of her? Learn all about a female pioneer of astronomy in this picture book biography with audio. Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born on July 4, 1868, and she changed the course of astronomy when she was just twenty-five years old. Henrietta spent years measuring star positions and sizes from photographs taken by the telescope at the Harvard College Observatory, where she worked. After Henrietta observed that certain stars had a fixed pattern to their changes, her discovery made it possible for astronomers to measure greater and greater distances—leading to our present understanding of the vast size of the universe. An astronomer of her time called Henrietta Leavitt “one of the most important women ever to touch astronomy,” and another close associate said she had the “best mind at the Harvard Observatory.” Henrietta Leaveitt's story will inspire young women and aspiring scientists of all kinds and includes additional information about the solar system and astronomy. This eBook edition also includes audio accompaniment.

The Pursuit of Harmony

The Pursuit of Harmony PDF Author: Aviva Rothman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649702X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A committed Lutheran excommunicated from his own church, a friend to Catholics and Calvinists alike, a layman who called himself a “priest of God,” a Copernican in a world where Ptolemy still reigned, a man who argued at the same time for the superiority of one truth and the need for many truths to coexist—German astronomer Johannes Kepler was, to say the least, a complicated figure. With The Pursuit of Harmony, Aviva Rothman offers a new view of him and his achievements, one that presents them as a story of Kepler’s attempts to bring different, even opposing ideas and circumstances into harmony. Harmony, Rothman shows, was both the intellectual bedrock for and the primary goal of Kepler’s disparate endeavors. But it was also an elusive goal amid the deteriorating conditions of his world, as the political order crumbled and religious war raged. In the face of that devastation, Kepler’s hopes for his theories changed: whereas he had originally looked for a unifying approach to truth, he began instead to emphasize harmony as the peaceful coexistence of different views, one that could be fueled by the fundamentally nonpartisan discipline of mathematics.

Seeing and Believing

Seeing and Believing PDF Author: Richard Panek
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140280616
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Tells the story, visionary by visionary and discovery by discovery, of the telescope, one of the few inventions that have revolutionized our view of the universe and how we fit into it.

Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World

Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World PDF Author: Johannes Kepler
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615921974
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The brilliant German mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), one of the founders of modern astronomy, revolutionized the Copernican heliocentric theory of the universe with his three laws of motion: that the planets move not in circular but elliptical orbits, that their speed is greatest when nearest the sun, and that the sun and planets form an integrated system. This volume contains two of his most important works: The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (books 4 and 5 of which are translated here) is a textbook of Copernican science, remarkable for the prominence given to physical astronomy and for the extension to the Jovian system of the laws recently discovered to regulate the motions of the Planets. Harmonies of the World (book 5 of which is translated here) expounds an elaborate system of celestial harmonies depending on the varying velocities of the planets.

Tycho and Kepler

Tycho and Kepler PDF Author: Kitty Ferguson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 144816723X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The extraordinary, unlikely tale of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler and their enormous contribution to astronomy and understanding of the cosmos is one of the strangest stories in the history of science. Kepler was a poor, devoutly religious teacher with a genius for mathematics. Brahe was an arrogant, extravagant aristocrat who possessed the finest astronomical instruments and observations of the time, before the telescope. Both espoused theories that seem off-the-wall to modern minds, but their fateful meeting in Prague in 1600 was to change the future of science. Set in one of the most turbulent and colourful eras in European history, when medieval was giving way to modern, Tycho and Kepler is a double biography of these two remarkable men.

Somnium

Somnium PDF Author: Johannes Kepler
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781981810031
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
Somnium is a Latin word for Dream. This novel was written by Johannes Kepler in 1608, in a time when a trip to the ethereal regions of the moon would be possible only with the assistance of supernatural forces. Historians consider this lunar exploration a remarkable and revolutionary text, and one of the most provocative and innovative of Kepler's works. Great authors/scientists such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan suggested it as the first science fiction story. If it is not, we can at least consider it as the first serious scientific work about lunar astronomy.

Shadow of Night

Shadow of Night PDF Author: Deborah Harkness
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123629
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestselling second installment in the All Souls series, from the author of The Discovery of Witches and The Black Bird Oracle. Look for the hit series “A Discovery of Witches,” now streaming on AMC+, Sundance Now, and Shudder! Picking up from A Discovery of Witches’ cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night takes reluctant witch Diana Bishop and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont on a trip through time to Elizabethan London, where they are plunged into a world of spies, magic, and a coterie of Matthew's old friends, the School of Night. As the search for Ashmole 782—the lost and enchanted manuscript whose mystery first pulled Diana and Matthew into one another's orbit—deepens and Diana seeks out a witch to tutor her in magic, the net of Matthew's past tightens around them. Together they find they must embark on a very different—and vastly more dangerous—journey. “A captivating and romantic ripping yarn,”* Shadow of Night confirms Deborah Harkness as a master storyteller, able to cast an “addictive tale of magic, mayhem and two lovers”(Chicago Tribune).