Johannes Kepler's Mystery Of The Cosmos

On December 27th, 1517, Katharina Guldenmann gave birth to Johannes Kepler in the town of Weil der Stadt, what is now present day Germany. His mother was an herbalist who aided her father with the inn. When Johnnes was around five years of age, Heinrich Kepler, Johannes’ father, was killed fighting in Holland. Young Johannes was prone to infections and sickness that he was left with crippled hands and his eyesight was impaired by smallpox. Guests at Kepler’s grandfather’s inn were astonished at his ability to solve any problem they could make up involving numbers despite his illnesses. His mother being the herbalist she was, tried to convey her love of the natural world to her son. She would take him outside at night and show him the sky. She would show him things
Kepler’s belief was that the sun exerted a force on the planets orbiting it. In 1596, at the age of 25, he published a book called Mystery of the Cosmos. His book logically explained why the sun lies at the center of the solar system. He noticed that Mercury and Venus always seem to be close to the sun, unlike Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This is because Mercury and Venus orbits are closer to the sun than Earth’s. Kepler said that if the sun and all the planets orbited Earth, there is no explanation as to why Mercury and Venus should always be near the sun. Including Earth, there were only six planets at the time. Kepler was able to justify these planets and their distances from the sun in terms of the five Platonic solid. These are the five highly symmetrical, regular, 3D solids whose perfect symmetry allow them to be used as dice. His Platonic solid theory produced a close fit to the planet-to-sun distances that Copernicus had found. Thrilled that he had found evidence of the hand of God in the solar system’s design, Kepler now sought better data. He hoped that more accurate astronomical observations would prove his