The Creator, who is the very source of geometry, does not stray from his own archetype.

Johannes Kepler
August Köhler, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The modern world is dominated by science, which has led to unprecedented achivements in nearly every aspect of human life. What we today call "science" (and which at the time was called "natural philosophy") really took off in the seventeenth century, at the beginning of the Baroque Period. Although the story is often told as if scholars woke up one morning, threw Aristotle out the window and stopped believing in God, that is not accurate. (After all, Copernicus was a church canon and Newton wrote more about theology than science.) What happened was a shift in methodology: scientists began to focus only on mechanism, the quantifiable aspects of physics, leaving qualitative questions like teleology, or purpose, to one side. To oversimplify, scientists stopped asking "Why?" and focused only on "How?" This method proved enormously successful for making predictions and developing new mechanical technologies to increase man's control over nature.

Copernicus was a Polish clergyman and astronomer who first proposed a robust heliocentric model of the universe. Unsatisfied with the ancient Greek model proposed by Ptolomey, which despite being relatively accurate was exceedingly complicated, Copernicus believed reality could be better explained by a simple system of circular orbits around the sun. To accommodate the nuance of observed data, his model made use of epicycles: celestial bodies revoling in smaller circles along their circular orbits. He published his model in 1543. The Copernican system had its own issues, but its elegance intrigued the next generation of astronomers.

Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman who created a model of the solar system that combined the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. In Brahe's model, the planets orbited the sun, but the sun orbited the earth. While not entirely accurate, his model was supported with copious amounts of empircal evidence, in particular the lack of any observable stellar parallax, which seemed to suggest the earth was indeed stationary.

Harmonices Mundi (1619)
Johannes Kepler, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Kepler was a student of Brahe's and spent years pouring over his data, convinced that God would would govern planetary motion by a mathematically elegant formula. He found it in his Laws of Planetary Motion, which he published in 1609, using Brahe's data to replace Copernicus' epicyclical orbits for elliptical ones. This is essentially correct, and Kepler continued to search for divine order in the data. In 1619, he published Harmonices Mundi, demonstrating that the mathematical ratios of planetary motion found in Brahe's data can be interpreted as musical harmony: the Musica Universalis or "Music of the Spheres," an inaudible cosmic hymn of the created order. His Third Law of Planetary Motion was discovered as a direct result of this musical approach to astronomy.

The son of an Italian violinist, Galileo was one of the first astronomers to use a telescope to aid in his observations. His observations of the phases of Venus caused him to reject the Tychnoic model in favor of the Copernican one. Although he initially had a supporter in Pope Urban VIII, in 1632 he wrote a treatise entitled Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which he put some of the pope's words into the mouth of a character named "Simplico." He was tried by the Roman Inquisition and placed under house arrest (but not, as popular imagination would have it, executed or forbidden from further research.)