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Tycho Brahe , born
Tyge Ottesen Brahe , was a
Danish nobleman best known today as an early
astronomer, though in his lifetime he was also well known as an
astrologer and
alchemist.
He was granted an estate on the island of
Hven and the funding to build the
Uraniborg, an early research institute, where he built large astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements. As an astronomer, Tycho worked to combine what he saw as the
geometrical benefits of the
Copernican system with the philosophical benefits of the
Ptolemaic system into his own model of the universe, the
Tychonic system. From 1600 until his death in 1601, he was assisted by
Johannes Kepler, who would later use Tycho's astronomical information to develop his own theories of astronomy. He is universally referred to as "Tycho" rather than by his surname "Brahe", as was common in Scandinavia.
He is credited with the most accurate astronomical observations of his time, and the data were used by his assistant Kepler to derive the
laws of planetary motion. No one before Tycho had attempted to make so many redundant observations, and the mathematical tools to take advantage of them had not yet been developed. He did what others before him were unable or unwilling to do — to catalogue the planets and stars with enough accuracy so as to determine whether the Ptolemaic or Copernican system was more valid in describing the heavens.
Life
Early years
Tycho Brahe was born
Tyge Ottesen Brahe , adopting the Latinised form
Tycho at around age fifteen . He is often misnamed
Tycho de Brahe. He was born at his family's ancestral seat of Knudstrup
Castle,
Denmark to Otte Brahe and Beate Bille. His twin brother died before being
baptized. . He also had two sisters, one older and one younger . Otte Brahe, Tycho's father, a
nobleman, was an important figure in the
Danish King's court. Beate Bille, Tycho's mother, also came from an important family which had produced leading churchmen and politicians. In his youth he also lived at Hvedborg Manor,
Funen,
Denmark with his uncle and also is thought to have attended Horne Church in nearby Horne.
Tycho later wrote that when he was around two, his uncle, Danish nobleman Jørgen Brahe, "
... without the knowledge of my parents took me away with him while I was in my earliest youth." Apparently this did not lead to any disputes nor did his parents attempt to get him back. Tycho lived with his childless uncle and aunt, Jørgen Brahe and Inger Oxe, in the Tostrup Castle until he was six years old. Around 1552 his uncle was given the command of Vordingborg Castle to which they moved, and where Tycho began a Latin education until he was 12 years old.
On April 19 1559, Tycho began his studies at the
University of Copenhagen. There, following the wishes of his uncle, he studied law but also studied a variety of other subjects and became interested in
astronomy. It was, however, the
eclipse which occurred on August 21 1560, particularly the fact that it had been predicted, that so impressed him that he began to make his own studies of astronomy helped by some of the professors. He purchased an ephemeris and books such as
Sacrobosco's
Tractatus de Sphaera,
Apianus's
Cosmographia seu descriptio totius orbis and
Regiomontanus's
De triangulis omnimodis.
I've studied all available charts of the planets and stars and none of them match the others. There are just as many measurements and methods as there are astronomers and all of them disagree. What's needed is a long term project with the aim of mapping the heavens conducted from a single location over a period of several years. — Tycho Brahe, 1563 .
Tycho realized that progress in the science of astronomy could be achieved not by occasional haphazard observations, but only by systematic and rigorous observation, night after night, and by using instruments of the highest accuracy obtainable. He was able to improve and enlarge the existing instruments, and construct entirely new ones. Tycho's naked eye measurements of planetary
parallax were accurate to the arcminute. His sister, Sophia, assisted Tycho in many of his measurements. These jealously guarded measurements became the possessions of Kepler following his death. Tycho was the last major astronomer to work without the aid of a
telescope, soon to be turned toward the sky by
Galileo.
While a student, Tycho lost part of his
nose in a
duel with
rapiers with Manderup Parsbjerg, a fellow Danish nobleman. This occurred in the Christmas season of 1566, after a fair amount of drinking, while the just turned 20-year-old Tycho was studying at the
University of Rostock in
Germany. Attending a dance at a professor's house, he quarrelled with Parsbjerg. A subsequent duel resulted in Tycho losing the bridge of his nose. A consequence of this was that Tycho developed an interest in
medicine and
alchemy. For the rest of his life, he was said to have worn a replacement made of
silver and
gold blended into a flesh tone, and used an adhesive balm to keep it attached. In 1901, though, Tycho's tomb was reopened and his remains were examined by medical experts. The nasal opening of the
skull was rimmed with green, a sign of exposure to
copper, not silver or gold. Some historians have speculated that he wore a number of different
prosthetics for different occasions, noting that a copper nose would have been more comfortable and less heavy than one of precious metals.
Death of his father
His foster father, uncle Jørgen Brahe, had already died in 1565 of pneumonia after rescuing
Frederick II of Denmark from drowning. In April 1567, Tycho returned home from his travels, where his father wanted him to take up law, but Tycho was allowed to make trips to Rostock, then on to Augsburg , Basel, and Freiburg. He was informed about his father's illness at the end of 1570, so he returned to Knudstrup, where his father died on May 9 1571. Soon after, his other uncle Steen Bille helped him build an observatory and alchemical laboratory at Herrevad Abbey.
Family life
In 1572, in Knudstrup, Tycho fell in love with Kirsten Jørgensdatter, a commoner whose father, Pastor Jorgen Hansen, was the
Lutheran clergyman of Knudstrup's village church. Under Danish law, when a nobleman and a common woman lived together openly as husband and wife, and she wore the keys to the household at her belt like any true wife, their alliance became a binding morganatic marriage after three years. The husband retained his noble status and privileges; the wife remained a commoner. Their children were legitimate in the eyes of the law, but they were commoners like their mother and could not inherit their father's name,
coat of arms, or land property.
Kirsten Jørgensdatter gave birth to their first daughter, Kirstine on October 12, 1573. Together they had eight children, six of whom lived to adulthood. In 1574, they moved to Copenhagen where their daughter Magdalene was born. Kirsten and Tycho lived together for almost thirty years until Tycho's death.
Tycho's Elk
Tycho often held large social gatherings in his castle, as he was a member of the
nobility. He was said to own one percent of the entire wealth of
Denmark at one point in the 1580s. He kept a dwarf named Jepp as a court
jester who sat under the table during dinner. Pierre Gassendi wrote that Tycho also had a tame
elk, and that his mentor the Landgraf Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel asked about an animal faster than a deer. Tycho replied writing there were none, but he could send his tame
elk. When Wilhelm replied he would accept one in exchange for a horse, Tycho replied with the sad news that the elk just died on a visit to entertain a nobleman at
Landskrona. Apparently during dinner the elk had drunk a lot of beer and fell down the stairs, and died.
Death
Tycho died on October 24 1601, several days after straining his bladder during a banquet. It had been said that to leave the banquet before it concluded would be the height of bad manners, and so he remained. His bladder, stretched to its limit, exploded. He died after eleven agonizing days.
However, recent investigations have suggested that Tycho did not die from urinary problems but most likely from mercury poisoning: toxic levels of it have been found in his hair and hair-roots. Tycho may have poisoned himself unintentionally by imbibing some mercury-containing medicine. Some have even speculated that Tycho may have been murdered, possibly by Kepler, though there is no solid evidence for this.
Tycho Brahe's body is currently interred in a tomb in the
Church of Our Lady in front of Týn near Old Town Square near the
Astronomical Clock in
Prague.
Career: observing the heavens
Nova
On November 11, 1572, Tycho observed a very bright star which unexpectedly appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia, now named
SN 1572. Since it had been maintained since
antiquity that the world beyond the orbit of the moon, i.e. that of the fixed stars, was eternal and unchangeable , other observers held that the phenomenon was something in the Earth's atmosphere. Tycho, however, observed that the
parallax of the object did not change from night to night, suggesting that the object was far away. Tycho argued that a nearby object should appear to shift its position with respect to the background. He published a small book,
De Stella Nova , thereby coining the term
nova for a "new" star . This discovery was decisive for his choice of astronomy as a profession. Tycho was strongly critical of those who dismissed the implications of the astronomical appearance, writing in the preface to
De Stella Nova: "O crassa ingenia. O caecos coeli spectatores" .
Tycho's discovery was the inspiration for
Edgar Allan Poe's poem,
Al Aaraaf. In 1998,
Sky & Telescope is an American [i] monthly magazine [i] covering all aspects of amateur astronomy [i] ...
magazine published an article by Donald W. Olson, Marilynn S. Olson and Russell L. Doescher arguing, in part, that Tycho's Supernova was also the same "star that's westward from the pole" in Shakespeare's
Hamlet is a tragedy [i] by William Shakespeare [i] and is one of h ...
.
Heliocentrism
Kepler tried, but was unable, to persuade Tycho to adopt the
heliocentric model of the
solar system. Tycho believed in a modified
geocentric model known as the
Tychonic system, for the same reasons that he argued that the supernova of 1572 was not near the Earth. He argued that if the Earth were in motion, then nearby stars should appear to shift their positions with respect to background stars. In fact, this effect of
parallax does exist; it could not be observed with the naked eye, or even with the telescopes of the next two hundred years, because even the nearest stars are much more distant than most astronomers of the time believed possible. The Tychonic system is very similar to the Copernican one, except that it has a static earth instead of a static sun.
In the years following
Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus in 1610, which made the
Ptolemaic system intractable, the Tychonic system became the major competitor with Copernicanism, and was adopted by the
Catholic Church for many years as its official astronomical conception of the universe.
Uraniborg, Stjerneborg, and Benátky nad Jizerou
King
Frederick II of
Denmark and
Norway, impressed with Tycho's 1572 observations, financed the construction of two observatories for Tycho on the island of
Hven in
Oresund. These were
Uraniborg and
Stjerneborg. Uraniborg also had a laboratory for his
alchemical experiments.
Because Tycho disagreed with
Christian IV, the new king of his country, he left Hven in 1597 and moved to
Prague in 1599. Sponsored by
Rudolf II, the
Holy Roman Emperor, he built a new observatory in a castle in
Benátky nad Jizerou, 50 km from Prague, and he worked there for one year. The emperor then had him move back to Prague, where he stayed until his death.
In return for their support, Tycho's duties included preparing
astrological charts and predictions for his patrons on events such as births,
weather forecasting, and providing astrological interpretations of significant astronomical events such as the
comet of 1577 and the
supernova of 1572.
Astronomy
Tycho was the preeminent observational astronomer of the pre-telescopic period, and his observations of
stellar and
planetary positions achieved unparalleled accuracy for their time. For example, Tycho measured Earth's
axial tilt as 23 degrees and 31.5 minutes, which he claimed to be more accurate than Copernicus by 3.5 minutes. After his death, his records of the motion of the planet
Mars enabled Kepler to discover the
laws of planetary motion, which provided powerful support for the
Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system.
Tycho himself was not a Copernican, but proposed a system in which the
Sun orbited the
Earth while the other planets orbited the
Sun. His system provided a safe position for astronomers who were dissatisfied with older models but were reluctant to accept the Earth's motion. It gained a considerable following after 1616 when Rome decided officially that the heliocentric model was contrary to both philosophy and Scripture, and could be discussed only as a computational convenience that had no connection to fact. His system also offered a major innovation: while both the geocentric model and the heliocentric model as set forth by Copernicus relied on the idea of transparent rotating crystalline spheres to carry the planets in their orbits, Tycho eliminated the spheres entirely.
He was aware that a star observed near the horizon appears with a greater altitude than the real one, due to atmospheric
refraction, and he worked out tables for the correction of this source of error.
To perform the huge number of products needed to produce much of his astronomical data, Tycho relied heavily on the then-new technique of
prosthaphaeresis, an algorithm for approximating products based on trigonometric identities that predated logarithms.
Astrology
Like the
fifteenth century astronomer Regiomontanus, Tycho Brahe appears to have accepted
astrological prognostications on the principle that the
heavenly bodies undoubtedly influenced
terrestrial events, but expressed skepticism about the multiplicity of interpretative schemes, and increasingly preferred to work on establishing a sound
mathematical astronomy. Two early tracts, one entitled
Against Astrologers for Astrology, and one on a new method of dividing the
sky into
astrological houses, were never published and are unfortunately now lost.
Tycho also worked in the area of
weather prediction, produced
astrological interpretations of the
supernova of 1572 and the
comet of 1577, and furnished his patrons Frederick II and
Rudolph II with
nativities and other predictions . An
astrological worldview was fundamental to Tycho's entire
philosophy of
nature. His interest in
alchemy, particularly the
medical alchemy associated with
Paracelsus, was almost as long-standing as his study of
astrology and astronomy simultaneously, and
Uraniborg was constructed as both
observatory and
laboratory.
In an introductory oration to the course of lectures he gave in
Copenhagen in 1574, Tycho defended
astrology on the grounds of correspondences between the heavenly bodies, terrestrial substances and bodily organs . He was later to emphasise the importance of studying
alchemy and
astrology together with a pair of emblems bearing the mottoes:
Despiciendo suspicio and
Suspiciendo despicio . As several scholars have now argued, Tycho's commitment to a relationship between macrocosm and microcosm even played a role in his rejection of
Copernicanism and his construction of a third world-system.
Bibliography
References
- Skautrup, Peter, 1941 Den jyske lov: Text med oversattelse og ordbog. Aarhus: Universitets-forlag.
- Wittendorff, ALex. 1994. Tyge Brahe. Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad.
from a translation from Gassendi
page 210 refers to Tycho's elk as cited by:
- Olson, Donald W.; Olson, Marilynn S.; Doescher, Russell L., "The Stars of Hamlet," Sky & Telescope
Further reading
- John Robert Christianson: On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe, science, and culture in the sixteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-521-65081-X
- Victor E. Thoren: The Lord of Uraniborg: a biography of Tycho Brahe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 ISBN 0-521-35158-8
- Kitty Ferguson: The nobleman and his housedog: Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler: the strange partnership that revolutionised science. London : Review, 2002 ISBN 0-747270-22-8
- Joshua Gilder and Anne-Lee Gilder Heavenly intrigue. New York: Doubleday, 2004 ISBN 0-385-50844-1
External links
- MacTutor History of Mathematics
- pages by Adam Mosley at Starry Messenger: An Electronic History of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
- - Full digital facsimile, Lehigh University.
- - Full digital facsimile, Smithsonian Institution.
- - Full digital facsimile, the Royal Library, Denmark. Includes Danish and English translations.
Named after Tycho
- Tycho crater on the Moon.
- Tycho Brahe crater on Mars.
- The name of American electronic musician Tycho:
- The name of an Australian powersynth band:
- An old name of an Irish synthpop band, now called .
- Tycho Brahe, pseudonym of Jerry Holkins and a character from the popular webcomic Penny Arcade.
- The AI Tycho from Bungie's
| company_logo = | company_type = Video game developer [i]
...
computer game
Marathon.
- Brother-Captain Tycho of the Blood Angels Chapter of Space Marines in Games Workshop's sci-fi tabletop wargame, Warhammer 40,000.
- Tycho Brahe is the name of a mysterious planetoid in the computer game Descent II.
- a Scandlines ferry connecting Helsingør in Denmark and Helsingborg in Sweden.
- Tycho Celchu, a character from Star Wars.
- A science college in Helsingborg
- A minor character in the fantasy series The Bartimaeus Trilogy
- In the PC game Tachyon: The Fringe, the TCG repair freighter in the third Bora mission is named Tycho Brahe.
- Tycho is mentioned as the least offensive of all the magicians that the demon Bartimaus has served in the Bartimaeus trilogy
- Tycobrahe Sound Company of Hermosa Beach, California, a US audio electronics company in the early 1970's specializing in live sound equipment, including amplifiers and mixing desks. Also known as manufacturer of the Octavia, an extremely rare and legendary guitar effect pedal invented in the mid-1960s by Steve Morris and originally used by Jimi Hendrix. Morris was Hendrix' guitar tech and later owner of Morris Sound Co. in London.
