Six-minute summary: Tycho Brahe

Hello readers! It’s time for another six-minute summary. This week, we’re discussing Tycho Brahe, a 16^th century Danish astronomer who revolutionised the collection of astronomical data. Wikipedia describes him as “the last major astronomer before the invention of the telescope” – and yet Brahe could have lived just long enough to see this paradigm shift in astronomy, if he hadn’t made the fatal error of holding in a wee. Intrigued? Good. But there’s more to this man than a strange death and a silly moustache.

Early life

Like most scientists at the time, Tycho Brahe was born into a rich family. He was of noble stock (more Kallo than Oxo), with all his grandfathers and great-grandfathers having been on the ‘privy council’, advising the king while he deliberated upon the throne. However, they barely had time to extract the silver spoon from baby Tycho’s mouth before he was whisked away from his parents by his childless uncle, who raised him as his own.

Tycho was shipped off to study law at the University of Copenhagen at the age of twelve. This was quite young even for the time – students at Oxford only started when they were fourteen. While at university, Brahe saw a solar eclipse and became obsessed with astronomy. He bought all the books available at the time (approximately three of them), and he soon realised that they weren’t accurate. In 1563, aged sixteen, he saw the close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, but the Copernican and Ptolemaic tables were several days off in their predictions. To me, this still sounds pretty impressive – but Brahe thought he could do better.

In 1566, aged nineteen, Brahe went to the University of Rostock. It was here that he had a drunken quarrel with his third cousin over who was the better mathematician, and as two learned young gentlemen, they knew the only logical way to settle the dispute was with a duel. Tycho lost his nose in the incident, and had to wear a prosthetic for the rest of his life. It used to be said that the nose was gold, but thanks to researchers exhuming his body and examining his bones in 2010, we now know it was brass. Perhaps the gold schnoz only came out on special occasions. Perhaps it is only a myth, forged in an unfortunate smelling accident.

At the age of 24, Tycho Brahe upset his family by marrying a commoner. The reason for this marriage is something of a mystery; they had eight children together, and remained married until he died, and yet he rarely mentions his wife in his correspondence to his peers. Under Danish law, none of his offspring were considered part of the nobility, and so they could never inherit his property – which would come to include some very important scientific documents and equipment.

The Uraniborg Observatory

In 1572, Tycho Brahe saw a new star appear in the sky, and deduced through the lack of parallax that it must lie beyond the moon and other planets. This contradicted the belief at the time that the distant stars were immovable and never changing, and upset a lot of people. However, Brahe was less than polite when it came to addressing his critics, writing such rebukes as “O crassia ingenia” (oh thick wits) and “O caecos coeli spectatores” (oh blind watchers of the sky).

Tycho Brahe wasn’t alone in believing he was a genius. In 1576, the king helped him set up an observatory at considerable expense on the remote island of Hven. Brahe named the observatory Uraniborg after Urania, the muse of astronomy, because he clearly had no fear of being perceived as pretentious. The observatory became a large research institute, with up to 100 students, and it had a paper mill and printing press that Brahe used to publish his own results (peer review? what peers?). He had high standards for data collection, and anchored all of his equipment to the bedrock, underground, to stop it shaking. Measurements were made every night, calculations were run the following day, and over two decades, he built up the finest astronomical dataset ever recorded.

However, the quality of the dataset didn’t stop Brahe having some baffling ideas. He was, in fact, the royal astrologer, and had to make annual predictions on the fates of the royal family based on the stars. He was also adamant that the Earth was at the centre of the solar system, unmoving, with the sun orbiting around it, but with the other planets orbiting the sun. His model was one of the most popular at the time – but we’ll get to that later.

Brahe treated the peasants on Hven very poorly, and expected taxes and free labour from them. So miffed were they that they took him to court, only to lose the case, and for him to continue to treat them poorly. Brahe also had a pet elk while he lived on Hven. It died after drinking a lot of beer and falling down some stairs. Make of that what you will.

Late life

In 1588, the king died, and Brahe lost his biggest source of funding. The regency council was led by someone who had quarrelled with Brahe in the past, and when the new king was crowned in 1596, he made laws to curb the powers of the affluent nobility. Brahe was less than impressed, and so moved to Prague, after writing the poem “Elegy to Dania” which accused the Danish of not appreciating his genius. In 1599 he became the imperial court astronomer to the Holy Roman Emperor, where he continued making predictions based on stars. It was here that Johannes Kepler became his assistant, and it was here that he died.

At a banquet in Prague, Brahe developed a bladder ailment, and he passed away eleven days later. Kepler wrote that Brahe didn’t want to leave the banquet hall to go to the toilet because it would be considered rude – and he paid the ultimate price for politeness. He spent the last few days in delirium, exclaiming that he hoped he hadn’t lived his life in vain, but still managing to write his own almost-humble epitaph: “lived like a sage and died like a fool”.

In the 1901, his body was exhumed to check for kidney stones (a little too late to be helpful) but found none (even less helpful), although trace amounts of mercury were found in his beard. In the 1990s, researchers latched onto the idea that he had been poisoned, possibly by Kepler, and so in 2010 his body was exhumed again, only for them to find that there was nowhere near enough mercury for him to have been poisoned. They concluded that he died from holding in a wee after all.

Scientific legacy

Tycho Brahe was an outstanding scientist, not necessarily for his ideas, but for his data collection. His observations were noteworthy for their quantity and accuracy, which was far beyond any of his predecessors or contemporaries. His notebooks were astoundingly detailed, including questions that he would come back to answer later, and sketches of what he saw. Of course, none of this would have been possible if he hadn’t been born into a noble family. Thanks to his wealth and connections, he could make as many instruments as he wanted, of greater size and quality than had ever been seen before. We can only imagine what his observatory would have looked like had he been born a few decades later, after the telescope revolutionised astronomy.

The Tycho Brahe model of the solar system was popular throughout the 17^th century. This is partly (mostly?) because the Catholic Church determined the heliocentric model to be heretical, and the Brahe model formed a compromise. Brahe argued that the Earth moving was “a violation not only of all physical truth but also of the authority of the Holy Scripture, which ought to be paramount” – so his feelings on the matter were clear (though I’d love to hear his definition of “physical truth”). Like many people at the time, he thought the Earth was simply too massive to move.

Brahe was firmly opposed to the heliocentric Copernican model, and the reasons for his opposition are fascinating. He expected to see parallax in the distant stars if the Earth was moving around the sun. When supporters of the Copernican model argued that the stars were too far away for parallax to be discernible, Brahe responded that if this were so, the stars had to be impossibly huge for us to be seeing them at all – bigger than the Earth. He wrote: “deduce these things geometrically if you like, and you will see how many absurdities accompany this assumption”, the tone of which makes it quite clear how he ended up in so many quarrels.

Although Brahe may have been wrong about the solar system, his incredible records allowed Kepler to deduce the laws of planetary motion, which then paved the way for Newton’s laws of gravitation. If Newton was standing on the shoulders of giants, then Tycho Brahe was certainly one of them. His model of the solar system was finally abandoned in 1729, when James Bradley discovered stellar aberration and disproved all forms of geocentricism.

In summary…

Tycho Brahe was quite a character. His story provides us some insight into the lives of scientists in the 16^th century, when academic careers could only be pursued by the privileged few who didn’t have to worry about their income, where their next meal came from, or childcare responsibilities – some of which still holds true today. His story also demonstrates the importance of high-quality data collection, because even if his own ideas were crazy, his data formed the foundation of better ideas years after he died. Finally, let his missing nose serve as a warning to us all: be calm and rational when discussing scientific ideas. And don’t make the fatal mistake of ignoring the urge to urinate.