The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin Read Free Book Online

the science of astronomy placed the entire intellectual framework of Western civilization, of knowledge and therefore power, at risk. From the time of Babylon through Bruno’s day, the heavens, with their innumerable stars and five wandering planets, were considered divine and unknowable by all save a select few: astrologers and priests in Babylonian times, the Church in Bruno’s times. Listen to the second century A.D . librarian of Alexandria Claudius Ptolemy as he defended an astronomy that placed Earth at the center of the universe with the Sun and five known planets traveling along “epicycles,” small circular orbits whose centers move at a constant rate along the path of a greater circle centered around the Earth. Answering objections to the irrational nature of the epicycle scheme (additional epicycles were continually being added to the model to make it match observation), Ptolemy replied, “It is impermissible to consider our human conditions equal to those of the immortal gods and to treat sacred things from the standpoint of others that are entirely dissimilar to them. . . . Thus we must form our judgment about celestial events not on the basis of occurrences on Earth, but rather on the basis of their own inner essence and the immutable course of all heavenly motions.” For Ptolemy, the laws of the heavens were completely different from those governing the Earth. The universe was unknowable, unchangeable, and uncontrollable by man. With the divine plansomething beyond comprehension, only a ruling priesthood, with its unique access to the mystical and supernatural, could tell the people what was right and what to do.
    So it stood for centuries, until the time came when a few thinkers challenged the notion that the universe would forever lie beyond humanity’s intellectual grasp. The action started with the work of Nicholas Copernicus, who between 1510 and 1514 redeveloped a long-forgotten heliocentric (Sun-centered) theory of the universe first posited by the third century B .C . Greek thinker Aristarchus of Samos. Under the heliocentric system, the planets traveled about the Sun in circular orbits. This concept was revolutionary, heretical even, and could not precisely match the observed planetary motions, yet some scholars of the time saw beauty in the fundamental simplicity of Copernicus’ system. Chief among them was Johannes Kepler.
    Born in 1571, Kepler grew to be a devout Lutheran, yet also a diehard Platonist with a passion for seeking the true nature of the universe in the rational laws of geometry. He would write, “Geometry is one and eternal, a reflection out of the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is one of the reasons to call man an image of God.”
    This quote is the key to the whole affair. If the human mind can understand the universe, it means that the human mind is fundamentally of the same order as the divine mind. If the human mind is of the same order as the divine mind,then everything that appeared rational to God as he constructed the universe, its “geometry,” can also be made to appear rational to the human understanding, and so if we search and think hard enough, we can find a rational explanation and underpinning for everything . This is the fundamental proposition of science. It is this proposition that Bruno died for. It is this proposition that Kepler set out to prove, and by so doing, to lift the darkness off the soul of Western civilization. And that he did, with a significant piece of help from the planet Mars.
    In February 1600, the same month as Bruno’s execution, Kepler went to work for Tycho Brahe, without question the greatest observational astronomer of his time. Brahe had his own theory of the universe, and entrusted the twenty-eight-year-old Kepler with the task of determining Mars’ orbit, all for the glory of Brahe’s own theories, of course. When Brahe died in October 1601, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II ordered that Kepler be put in charge of the