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]
Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue. Science is still catching up with this. J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003.
The earth also is spherical, since it presses upon its center from every direction.
I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up ninety-nine per cent of our living substance were cooked in the deep interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. Gathered up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventually they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its planets, and ourselves. Three billion years ago, life arose upon the earth. It is the only life in the solar system.
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn't understood it.
I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.
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