The year is 1615. Somewhere in Europe, there is an outdoors outpost for members of the scientific community. Astronomers, mathematicians, biologists, paleontologists, botanists, anatomists…all the great scientific disciplines gather in the same place, in hopes of getting their manuscripts published by the wealthy editors of the time. Among these men is a middle-aged German, spindly, carrying the single existing copy of his work on planetary motion and planetary laws. In that moment, however, he gets a letter from his sister, telling him that their widowed mother is on trial for witchcraft. Sadly, he considers himself guilty for that fact.
The middle-aged man described in this scene is Johannes Kepler, a mathematician who applied rules of trigonometry to further Nicolaus Copernicus’ work on the heliocentric model of the Solar System, as well as describing the orbits of planets and the laws of planetary motion. Like many other scientists of the era, this earned him persecution from the Catholic Church of the time, which supported the geocentric model of the Solar System. But this was not the only thing which earned him a name in the Church’s blacklist. Kepler was not only a famous mathematician, he has also been credited as the true inventor of the genre of science fiction, WAY before Jules Verne or H.G. Wells.
Kepler’s short written narrative was intended as a clever allegory advancing the Copernican philosophy. It was groundbreaking in many ways: Describing the effects of gravity decades before Sir Isaac Newton described such a force; envisioning speech synthesis centuries before computers; and presaging space travel three hundred years before Neil Armstrong and the Apollo Moon Landing. Kepler was a pioneer in astrophysics and lunar astrology.
The plot of the short story concerns a young Icelandic boy and his mother, a medicine woman, who were modeled after Kepler and his own mother. Kepler loves reading volumes of ancient magic and ancient sorcerers, and then has a dream of this island which he had read of in one of them. The dream contains various scientific algorithms which would be furthered through the work of later scientists: How solar eclipses would look like from the moon; how planets vary in size due to the Moon’s distance from earth; an idea about the size of the Moon and the presence of craters on the Moon, etc. The moon is painted as an island kingdom with inhabitants, life conditions, and a life-and-death cycle, which give it its science fiction turn.
Kepler published the work as an allegory of his own scientific work based on logic and observation, not as a tenant for superstition. But when he was about to publish Somnium, the first science fiction narrative, a German multimillionaire stole his copy (the only one, and there wasn’t even copyright), and started to spread oral word around towns, barbershops, flea markets, etc. He spread word that Kepler was a kook and that his mother was a witch who, among other things, appeared through magical doors; paralyzed a schoolmaster with a drink of wine; and cursed a young girl with a simple elbow rub, causing inhuman pain. 69-year-old Katharina Kepler was to put on trial for witchcraft. Johannes was only 41 at the time.
Throughout the trial, Kepler acted as a defender of her mother, using science and proofs of his own work to disprove the superstitious allegations of the court. The trial went on for six years, and despite all of Kepler’s hard work, Katharina was given a lifelong sentence. In a small victory, Kepler managed to have his mother moved to a new prison to improve her incarceration conditions. 14 years later, ill-will had soothed a bit and she was released, but the stigma of a witchcraft accusation is magnanimous. Katharina was forbidden to return to her village and died six months after her release; and Kepler never told any of his friends in the scientific community why he had been called away from his work.
Kepler died believing his magnum opus would never be published, but fortunately, his son Ludwig made it his task to make sure the book went to the printers, rescuing all of his father’s hard work and kickstarting a new literary trend in the process. Throughout the decades and centuries to come, scientists such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein furthered Kepler’s investigation, describing gravity as the fundamental force of attraction between any two objects in the universe, and developing formulas to describe said attraction.
The case of Katharina Kepler has been a source of deep investigation in the modern century. In 2015, 400 years after the trial, German Cambridge graduate and cultural historian Ulinka Rublack published the book The Astronomer and the Witch: Johanne’s Kepler Fight for his Mother.
Science divulgators such as Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov have referred to Johannes Kepler’s Somnium as one of the earliest, if not the earliest, works of science fiction. But interwoven with scientific pioneering is the story of a man who lived a time when superstition, paranoia, and irrationality clouded judgement and fear of the new. The same superstition, paranoia, and irrationality that dominates politics and society today. If anything, Kepler was not only a scientist and a pioneer: He was a true connoisseur of human nature, and I can only dare to say we need more people like him in the present era: researchers driven by curiosity, logic and common sense who are willing to break barriers and even with the balls of risking their own lives for the sake of truth.
Sources
https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/12/26/katharina-kepler-witchcraft-dream/?fbclid=IwAR3hoB1SWhr7xpmQRMWCkjkhUcu-EK2wRCSmTBgBy6Xn_y_gUzYv3WduxLs, accessed May 11th, 2021.
https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/johannes-kepler-mother-witch-180957616/, accessed May 14th, 2021.
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201508/physicshistory.cfm, accessed May 13th, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somnium_(novel), accessed May 16th, 2021.
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