Every great thinker kept notes. This one honors the astronomer who proved that the planets move in ellipses and gave Newton the foundations he needed to explain why.
This Kepler hardcover journal features a bold, graphic portrait on the front cover and a biographical tribute on the back - the story of the man behind the art, printed where you'll see it every time you pick it up. Part of the Architects of Reason collection. Designed for the work of serious thinking - study sessions, research, reflection, the pursuit of questions worth asking.
ABOUT JOHANNES KEPLER (1571–1630)
Kepler came to astronomy through mysticism and stayed through mathematics. He initially believed the planets moved in circular orbits because circles were perfect - a belief inherited from the Greeks and held by virtually everyone who had thought about the problem. Then he looked at Tycho Brahe's data, which was the most precise observational record of planetary motion ever compiled, and realized the circles didn't fit.
It took him eight years of calculation to work out what did. The answer was ellipses - not circles but ellipses, with the Sun at one focus - and the discovery demolished two thousand years of astronomical assumption in a single stroke. His three laws of planetary motion, published between 1609 and 1619, described not just the shape of orbits but the relationship between a planet's distance from the Sun and the time it takes to complete one orbit. They were the most precise description of celestial motion ever produced.
Newton read Kepler carefully. His law of universal gravitation was, in part, an explanation of why Kepler's laws worked - a synthesis that would not have been possible without the observational foundation Kepler had built.
He worked through war, plague, the trial of his mother for witchcraft, and chronic poverty. He died in 1630 having fundamentally changed how humanity understands its place in the solar system. The universe he described - mathematical, orderly, and vast - is the one we still inhabit.
PRODUCT FEATURES
- Hardcover with matte laminate finish
- Full wraparound portrait print
- Biographical tribute printed on back cover
- Flexible casewrap binding
- Perforated pages for clean tear-out
- 150 lined pages
- A tool for your ideas. A tribute to his.