Heaven on Earth

How Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo Discovered the Modern World

By: L. S. Fauber

Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby

A vivid narrative that connects the lives off our great astronomers as they discovered, refined, and popularized the first major scientific discovery of the modern era: that the Earth moves around the Sun

Today, we take for granted that a telescope allows us to see galaxies millions of light years away. But before its invention, people used nothing more than their naked eye to fathom what took place in the visible sky. So how did four men in the 1500s - of different nationality, age, religion, and class - collaborate to discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun? With this radical discovery that went against the Church, they created our contemporary world - and with it, the uneasy conditions of modern life.

Heaven on Earth is an intimate examination of this scientific family - that of Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei. Fauber juxtaposes their scientific work with insight into their personal lives and political considerations, which shaped their pursuit of knowledge. Uniquely, he shows how their intergenerational collaboration was actually what made the scientific revolution possible.

Ranging from the birth of astronomy and the methods of early scientific research, Fauber reveals the human story that underlies this civilization altering discovery. And contrary to the competitive nature of research today, collaboration was key to early scientific discovery. Before the rise of university research institutions, deep thinkers only had each other. They created a kind of family, related to each other via intellectual pursuit rather than blood.

Filled with rich characters and sweeping historical scope, Heaven on Earth reveals how the strong connections between these pillars of intellectual history moved science forward - and how, without them, we might have waited a long time for a heliocentric model of the universe.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 L. S. Fauber (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing

Good interweaving of 4 great astronomers

First off, I don’t understand that 1 Star review at all.

The story of how Brahe, Kepler and Galileo worked together (and sometimes against each other) in the world that Copernicus created is foundational to modern physics. How they broke with Greek thought and led to Newton is an important story that deserves to be told and retold.

I’m not sure if telling the story in sections devoted to a specific astronomer is the best way to tell it - it jumps around, but having so many locations and time to cover might force it. Fauber deserves a lot of credit for returning again and again to each astronomer’s actual work - I’m glad he understands it, because I’ll never take the time to actually understand each dead end theory or goofy philosophy.

I think there are a few places where the book might be strengthened, some fall outside the scope of the book. The first, there’s only the briefest mention of how Islamic astronomers and commentaries began the process of poking holes in Greek thought and set the stage for Copernicus. That’s an area for real scholarly research and not just a popular retelling. The story is there, but the military conflicts at the time between Europe and the Ottoman Empire have served to make it hard for either side to give any credit to the other for anything.

The second, the lead in to Newton should have been stronger at the end. Kepler’s call for a new mathematician to continue the work, and a new math to do it were downright prophetic. In the same way that Brahe, Kepler and Galileo read Copernicus, Newton had read Kepler and Galileo. A more explicit discussion of how Kepler gave Newton the correct geometry and postulated a motive force tie directly to gravity and calculus. Galileo’s work on basic mechanics (pendulums and inclined planes) leads to Newton’s own 3 laws of motion.

Finally, a discussion of Brahe’s ridiculously good eyesight and how it created the data Kepler used probably deserved more discussion. Brahe may have hit the natural limit for human eyesight, and his instruments were the best of the day for measuring stellar positions. Kepler knew the observations were the best available and that Brahe wouldn’t fudge his work, even when he disagreed with his mentor’s conclusions. Brahe and Tycho were the right people at the right time - one to take the measurements, the other to interpret the data.

Overall, VERY good book with lots of insights.

Edit: the two books titled “The House of Wisdom” both discuss the Arabic contributions to Ptolemy and mathematics that led to Copernicus’ work. Of the two, I think I prefer Lyons’ book a bit more. Taking them together shows the gradual progress of scientific thought.