Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a sickly child born into a poor family. With weak vision and deformed hands, his capacity to observe and record astronomical phenomena was limited, but his intelligence
was extraordinary and his mathematical aptitude was vigorous and strong. He earned a scholarship to
the University of Tübingen where he was introduced to the ideas of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), whose heliocentric model of the solar system ushered in the Scientific Revolution that changed the course of human history.

Perhaps it was because of his limitations that Kepler became who he was. He is often credited as the founder of modern optics, and was the first to investigate the way pictures are formed with a pin hole camera; first to explain the process of vision by refraction within the eye; first to design eyeglasses for nearsightedness and farsightedness; and first to explain depth perception as the result of binocular vision. In Dioptrice, published 1611, he was first to explain the principles of how a telescope works; first to discover and describe the properties of total internal reflection. If this weren’t enough firsts already, Kepler was also first to explain that tides are caused by the Moon, first to suggest that the Sun rotates on an axis, and first to derive logarithms purely based on mathematics. This sculpture is an homage to a man who was visually impaired and helped humanity to see.

During the Counter Reformation, Kepler was exiled to Prague where he began to work with Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), whose comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations were by far the most accurate available at the time. Brahe employed Kepler to analyze his data, leading to Kepler’s seminal laws of planetary motion. His first two laws were discovered in 1605 and 1609, and were presented in his book Astronomia Nova (1609). In 1619, he published Harmonices Mundi where he introduced his final law of planetary motion, sometimes called the law of periods, creating an entirely new foundation for the science of astronomical calculation. Translated into Andrea Galvani’s neon equation, Kepler’s third law states that “the squares of the period times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.” Illustrated by this equation, Kepler mathematically demonstrated a systematic connection between a planet’s distance
and the time it takes to travel around its orbit. It was this law, not an apple, that led Newton to his law of gravitation.