Tycho Brahe,
prince of astronomers

Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was one of astronomy's great exotics. He was a Danish nobleman, kidnapped as a baby by his uncle and brought up in his castle. He then became a brilliant student, who defied social convention by studying mathematics and not law; and he lost part of his nose in a duel, replacing it with a golden prosthesis. As Renaissance Denmark’s celebrity intellectual, Tycho was visited by kings and ambassadors, and maintained a dwarf, Jepp, who possessed supposed clairvoyant powers, as Court Jester at his observatory residence, Uraniborg (Castle of the Heavens). And to top it all, poor Tycho died from holding his water too long at an imperial feast in Prague. Yet above all this, Tycho was the effective founder of sophisticated instrument-based astronomy in early modern Europe. For he set out to test the truth or otherwise of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory not by speculation, but by rigorous observation and analysis. And he did all this several decades before the invention of the telescope.

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About Allan Chapman

Allan Chapman is a historian of science at Oxford University, with a special interest in the history of astronomy. He has recently published two biographies, Mary Somerville and the World of Science (Canopus, 2004) and England’s Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the seventeenth century scientific revolution (Institute of Physics, 2005), both subjects of previous AstroFest talks. He has made several history of astronomy programmes for television and in 2004 was awarded an honorary doctorate for his work in the history of astronomy by the University of Central Lancashire. His book The Victorian Amateur Astronomer (1998) will appear in a revised edition (Gracewing) in 2008.

Wikipedia entry