Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History's Greatest Scientific Discoveries

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Jun 14, 2005 - History - 336 pages
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.
 

Contents

The Secret of the Universe
96
Marriage
112
Imperial Mathematician
133
Intolerance
147
Confrontation in Prague
156
Bad Faith
169
Tycho and Rudolf
177
The Mästlin Affair
183
Thirteen Hours
216
The Elixir
223
The Motive and the Means
235
Theft
247
The Three Laws
250
Epilogue
258
Brahes Recipe for His Mercury Drug
264
Notes
269

The Pot Boils
190
The Death of Tycho Brahe
196
In the Crypt
203
Revealing Symptoms
209
Bibliography
286
Illustration Credits
297
Index
298
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Joshua Gilder has worked as a magazine editor, White House speechwriter, and State Department official and is the author, most recently, of the novel Ghost Image. Anne-Lee Gilder was formerly a producer and investigative reporter for German television. They live outside Washington, D.C.

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