The Martyrs of Science, Or, The Lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler

Before science became a profession, it was a calling that could cost you everything. David Brewster's 19th-century masterpiece traces the lives of three men who wagered their livelihoods, and in some cases their immortal souls, on the truth they glimpsed through their telescopes. Galileo, the brilliant Italian who turned his spyglass toward the heavens and found evidence that shattered the Aristotelian cosmos the Church had defended for centuries. His confrontation with Rome would make him the defining symbol of science versus dogma. Then there's Tycho Brahe, the Danish nobleman who wore a silver nose (the original one lost in a duel over a mathematical formula) and built the most precise astronomical observations of his age, data that would prove essential to his successor. And finally Johannes Kepler, the German mystic whose laws of planetary motion laid the groundwork for Newton, written by a man who saw astronomy as a path to God's mind. Brewster depicts these men not as marble statues but as living, suffering, quarreling human beings who changed how we see the universe.