The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the belief that the universe is governed by mathematical principles established by God.
Johannes Kepler's quote reflects his conviction that the study of the natural world should lead to an understanding of the underlying rational order and harmony, which he believed were divinely imposed. By asserting that mathematics is the language through which God reveals this order, Kepler emphasizes the profound connection between faith and scientific inquiry, suggesting that true knowledge of the universe can lead to a greater appreciation of its divine creator.
In practice
In a lecture on the importance of mathematics in understanding the universe.
...Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.
A most unfailing experience... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.
We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.
I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.
Eyesight should learn from reason.
I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]
Human exploration is something that's been going on for thousands of years, and the models that worked 500 years ago are likely to work again today.
Science fiction is not formulaic.
We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
I don't expect that the million will ever be won, simply because there is no confirming evidence for any paranormal claims to date.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.
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