Although Kepler is remembered today chiefly for his three laws of planetary motion, these were but three elements in his much broader search for cosmic harmonies and a celestial physics. With the exception of Rheticus, Kepler became the first enthusiastic Copernican after Copernicus himself; he found an astronomy whose clumsy geocentric or heliostatic planetary mechanisms typically erred by several degrees and he left it with a unified and physically motivated heliocentric system nearly 100 times more accurate. When Kepler was twenty-five and much occupied with astrology, he compared the members of his family with their horoscopes. His grandfather Sebald, mayor of Weil in 1571, when Kepler was born, was “quick-tempered and obstinate.” His grandmother was “clever, deceitful, blazing with hatred, the queen of busybodies.” His father, Heinrich, was described as “criminally inclined, quarrelsome, liable to a bad end” and destined for a “marriage fraught with strife.” When Kepler was three years old, his father joined a group of mercenary soldiers to fight the Protestant uprising in Holland, thereby disgracing his family. Soon after his return in 1576, he …show more content…
Maestlin knew Copernican astronomy well; the 1543 De revolutionibus he owned is probably the most thoroughly annotated copy extant. Although Maestlin was at best a very cautions Copernican, he planted the seed that with Kepler later blossomed into a full Copernicanism. Kepler’s quarterly grades at the university show him as a “straight A” student; and when he applied for a scholarship renewal at Tübingen, the senate noted that he had “such a superior and magnificent mind that something special may be expected of him.” Nevertheless, Kepler himself wrote concerning the science and mathematics of his university curriculum that “these were the prescribed studies, and nothing indicated to me a particular bent for