The Danish aristocrat and astronomer Tycho Brahe personified the inventive vitality of Renaissance life in the sixteenth century. Brahe lost his nose in a student duel, wrote Latin poetry, and built one of the most astonishing villas of the late Renaissance, while virtually inventing team research and establishing the fundamental rules of empirical science. His observatory at Uraniborg functioned as a satellite to Hamlet’s castle of Kronborg until Tycho abandoned it to end his days at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. This illustrated biography presents a new and dynamic view of Tycho’s life, reassessing his gradual separation of astrology from astronomy and his key relationships with Johannes Kepler, his sister Sophie, and his kinsmen at the court of King Frederick II.

The Danish aristocrat and astronomer Tycho Brahe personified the inventive vitality of Renaissance life in the sixteenth century. Brahe lost his nose in a student duel, wrote Latin poetry, and built one of the most astonishing villas of the late Renaissance, while virtually inventing team research and establishing the fundamental rules of empirical science. His observatory at Uraniborg functioned as a satellite to Hamlet’s castle of Kronborg until Tycho abandoned it to end his days at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. This illustrated biography presents a new and dynamic view of Tycho’s life, reassessing his gradual separation of astrology from astronomy and his key relationships with Johannes Kepler, his sister Sophie, and his kinsmen at the court of King Frederick II.

Heavenly Intrigue is the fascinating, true account of the seventeenth-century collaboration between Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe that revolutionized our understanding of the universe–and ended in murder.One of history’s greatest geniuses, Kepler laid the foundations of modern physics with his revolutionary laws of planetary motion. But his beautiful mind was beset by demons. Born into poverty and abuse, half-blinded by smallpox, he festered with rage, resentment, and a longing for worldly fame. Brahe, his mentor, was a flamboyant aristocrat who had spent forty years mapping the heavens with unprecedented accuracy–but he refused to share his data with Kepler. With Brahe’s untimely death in Prague in 1601, rumors flew across Europe that he had been murdered. But it took twentieth-century forensics to uncover the poison in his remains, and the detective work of Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder to identify the prime suspect–the ambitious, envy-ridden Kepler himself. A fast-paced, true-life account that reads like a thriller, Heavenly Intrigue is a remarkable feat of historical re-creation.

Johannes Kepler was an obsessive, devout teacher of astronomy, and Tycho Brahe was a cruel, extravagant aristocrat who believed the sun orbited the Earth. Kepler's analytical abilities were said to be second to none, while Brahe was one of the best observational astronomers of all time. Their meeting in Prague in 1600 led to an extraordinary, if uneasy, alliance which eventually resulted in a huge leap forward in the understanding of astronomy. Together they produced the first three laws of planetary motion. This book tells the story of a major watershed in the history of human thought.

The Lord of Uraniborg is a comprehensive biography of Tycho Brahe, father of modern astronomy, famed alchemist and littérateur of the sixteenth-century Danish Renaissance. Written in a lively and engaging style, Victor Thoren's biography offers interesting perspectives on Tycho's life and presents alternative analyses of virtually every aspect of his scientific work. A range of readers interested in astronomy, history of astronomy and the history of science will find this book fascinating.

Tycho Brahe was an eccentric Danish astronomer in the 1500s. Growing up in the wealthy home of his uncle, he was provided with the freedom to pursue his ambitions in life. While attending college, Tycho viewed a solar eclipse, which scholars had predicted would happen. He was fascinated that science could predict such phenomenal events, and he devoted much of his time to studying the heavens. Using modern instruments and techniques to measure the positions of the stars and the movements of the planets, Brahe revolutionized the way astronomers viewed the night sky.

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.

This book explores Brahe's wide range of activities which encompass much more than his reputed role of astronomer. Christianson broadens this singular perspective by portraying Brahe as Platonic philosopher, Paracelsian chemist, Ovidian poet, and devoted family man. This pioneering study includes capsule biographies of two dozen men and women, including Johannes Kepler, Willebrord Snel, Willem Blaeu, several bishops and numerous technical specialists all of whom helped shape the culture of the Scientific Revolution. Under Tycho Brahe's leadership, their teamwork achieved breakthroughs in astronomy, scientific method, and research organization that were essential to the birth of modern science.

A theoretical astrophysicist explores the ideas that transformed our knowledge of the universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is someone at the forefront of the research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. She not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance. The formation and growth of black holes, dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the echo of the big bang, the discovery of exoplanets, and the possibility of other universes—these are some of the puzzling cosmological topics of the early twenty-first century. Natarajan discusses why the acceptance of new ideas about the universe and our place in it has never been linear and always contested even within the scientific community. And she affirms that, shifting and incomplete as science always must be, it offers the best path we have toward making sense of our wondrous, mysterious universe. “Part history, part science, all illuminating. If you want to understand the greatest ideas that shaped our current cosmic cartography, read this book.”—Adam G. Riess, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2011 “A highly readable, insider’s view of recent discoveries in astronomy with unusual attention to the instruments used and the human drama of the scientists.”—Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe and Einstein's Dream