The Watershed By Arthur Koestler Spanish Tertament Gladiators Darkness at Noon Scum of the Earth Arrival andDeparture The Yogi and the Commissar Twilight Bctr Thieves in the Night Insight andOutlook The Structure of a Miracle Age of Longing Promise and Fulfillment .Arrow in the Blue The InvisibleWriting Trail of the Dinosaur Reflections on Hanging The Sleepwolkers ARTHUR KoESTLER, born in Budapest in 1905 and edu­ cated in Viemia, began his writing career as an editor of a German and Arabian weekly newspaper in Cairo. This led to his becoming the Near East correspondent for the Ullstein newspapers of Berlin. Future assign­ ments included the Graf Zepplin's flight over the Arctic in 1931 and the Civil War in Spain, where he was im­ prisoned, sentenced to death, and finally pardoned by the rebels. An active communist from 1931 to 1938, Koestler achieved world fame with DARKNESS AT NooN ( 1941), his explosive anti-communist novel. He now lives in England. A more comprehensive biography ap­ pears in John Durston's Foreword. THE WATERSHED A Biography of Johannes Kepler .Arthur Koestler Foreword by John Durston ILLUSTRATED BY R. PAUL LARKIN Published by Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York LibrtJT)' of Congress Catalog Card Number 6o-13537 Copyright© 1960 by EducatiorudServices Incorporated From THE SLEEPWALKERS © Arthur Koestler 1959 by prmnjssion of the author and The Macmillan Company, New York and Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. All Rights Reserved Printed in the United Statesof Americtt THE SCIENCE STUDY SERIES The Science Study Series offers to students and to the general public the writing of distinguished authors on the most stirring and fundamental topics of physics, from the smallest known particles to the whole universe. Some of the books tell of the role of physics in the world of man, his technology and civilization. Others are biographical in nature, telling the fascinating stories of the great discoverers and their discoveries. All the au­ thors have been selected both for expertness in the fields they discuss and for ability to communicate their special knowledge and their own views in an interesting way. The primary purpose of these books is to provide a sur­ vey of physics within the grasp of the young student or the layman. Many of the books, it is hoped, will eo­ courage the reader to make his own investigations of natural phenomena. Thesebooks are published as part of a fresh approach to the teaching and study of physics. At the Massa­ chusetts Institute of Technology during 1956 a group of physicists, high school teachers, journalists, apparatus designers, film producers, and other specialists organized the Physical Science Study Committee, now operating as a part of Educational Services Incorporated, Water­ town, Massachusetts. They pooled their knowledge and 7 The Science Study Series experiencetoward the design and creation of aids to the learning of physics. Initially their effort was supported by the National Science Foundation, which has con­ tinued to aid the program. The Ford Foundation, the Fund for the Advancement of Education, and the Al­ fred P. Sloan Foundation have also given support. The Committee is creating a textbook, an extensive film series, a laboratory guide, especially designed apparatus, and a teachers' source book for a newintegrated second­ ary school physics program which is undergoing continu­ ous evaluation with secondary school teachers. The Series is guided by a Board of Editors, consisting of Paul F. Brandwein, the Conservation Foundation and Harcourt, Brace and Company; John H. Durston, Edu­ cational Services Incorporated; Francis L. Friedman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Samuel A. Goudsmit, Brookhaven National Laboratory; Bruce F. Kingsbury, Educational Services Incorporated; Philippe LeCorbeiller, Harvard University; and Gerard Piel, Sci­ entific American. 8 FOREWORD The Watershed is taken from Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers (The Macmillan Company, 1959), which bears the subtitle,"A Historyof Man's Changing Vision of the Universe." The Board of Editors has included it in the Science Study Seriesbecause its subject, Johannes Kepler, is a significantfigure in the historyof science and because it is the first essay in any language to explore Kepler's weird genius. Over the centuries science has made great use of Kepler's works but ignored the man. Few of his contemporaries tried, or cared, to understand him, and his famous laws, resurrected by Isaac Newton, were all of him that seemed to have escaped the grave. But time, happily, has a way of redressing balances. In this biography, for which the world had to wait three hundred and thirty years, Kepler the man emerges as a rich, if outlandish, character, deserving of immortality. To do any genius justice takes a practiced pen, and if he is outlandish to boot, the task is magnified a hundred times over. It is fortunate that Kepler should have caught the !ancy of an accomplished novelist like Mr. Koestler, and it is doubly fortunate that Mr. Koestler should have a more than passing acquaintance with physics. True, he has made his reputation outside the field of science-his novel Darkness at Noon was one of the genuinely influential books of our mid-century-but 9 Foreword physical science was an early love, to which, in recent years, he has returned. Mr. Koestlerstudied physics at the engineering school of the University of Vienna in the 192.os and later earned his living writing about science for lay readers. A Hungarian by birth, he might be described as a European-at-large; since boyhood he has spent little time in his native land. When he left the engineering school, he roamed the Near East for a while, farmed in Pales­ tine, hawked lemonade about the streets of Haifa, and edited a German and Arabian weekly newspaper in Cairo. This last occupation led to his becoming Near East correspondent for the Ullstein newspapers, a pub­ lishing house of great respectability in pre-World War II Berlin. His journalistic career broadened his horizons. As Ullstein science editor, he met some of the outstanding men of twentieth-centuryphysics . He went to the Arctic in the Graf Zeppelin, and he visited Samarkand and other remote places of Soviet Central Asia. He was a free-lance correspondent in Paris. In the Spanish Civil War he was a correspondent for the London News Chronicle; the rebels captured him and would have exe­ cuted him if the British Foreign Office had not inter­ vened. In World War II he spent weary months in various alien detention camps, where his main concern was to keep out of the hands of Nazi SS troopers, and he served in the French and British armies. An ardent Zionist since youth, he returned to Palestine after the war. All these adventures and experiences you can read about in his books, including his autobiography. He now makes his home in England. Mr. Koestler was an active Communist from 1931 to 1938. Firsthand observation of the deceits, the brutali­ ties, and the inhumanity of Stalin's brand of Commu­ nism disillusioned him and awakened him to its threat to civllization. This disillusionment resulted in Dark- 10 FC1Teword ness at Noon, a powerful psychological study of an old Bolshevik victim of the Soviet purge trials of the 1930s. It is not too much to say that thisbook was a major in­ fluence in opening the eyes of the intellectuals of West­ ern Europe and the United States to the perils of Communism. While war, Communism, and Zionism seem far afield from elliptical orbits, Mr. Koestler's experiences among the persecuted and displaced of this world have given him an understanding of human oddities that enlivens and enlarges his portrait of Kepler. It is his thesis in The Watershed that this strange, tormented genius stood astride the historical crest-the intellectual divide -that separated ancient and medieval thought from modern observational science- hence the title. For young people interested in physics-and the Science Study Series is dedicated to them-The Watershed is an incomparable account of one of the momentous discov­ eries. Neither in his approach to science nor in his ap­ proach to life is Kepler to be recommended as an ideal pattern, but in this biography there is much to learn about history, physics, and people. JOHN H. DURSTON 11 CONTENTS TBE SCIENCE STUDY SERIES 7 FOREWORD 9 Chapter One TBE YOUNG KEPLER 17 1. Decline of a Family 17 2. Job 24 3. Orphic Purge 26 4· Appoinbnent 33 5· Astrology 38 Chapter Two THE "cosMIC MYSTERY' 43 1. The Perfect Solids 43 2. Contents of the Mysterium 49 3· Back to Pythagoras 59 Chapter Three CROWING PAINS 67 1. The Cosmic Cup 67 2. Marriage 71 3· Limbering Up 74 4· Waitingfor Tycho So Chapter Four TYCBO DE BRAHE 85 1. The Quest for Precision 85 2. The New Star 90 3· Sorcerer' s Island 94 Contents 4· Exile 98 5· Prelude to the Meeting 101 Chapter Five TYCHO AND KEPLER 107 1. The Gravity of Fate 107 2. The Inheritor 116 Chapter Six THE GIVING OF THE LAWS 12.2 1. Astronomia Nova 12.2 2. Opening Gambits 124 3· The First Assault 130 4· The Eight Minutes' Arc 133 5· The Wrong Law 135 6. The Second Law 139 7· The First Law 141 8. Some Conclusions 147 9· The Pitfalls of Gravity 151 10. Matter and Mind 155 Chapter Seven KEPLER DEPRESSED 16o 1. Publishing Difficulties 160 2. Reception of the Astronomia Nova 163 3· Anticlimax 165 4· The Grea t News 168 Chapter Eight KEPLER AND GALILEO 170 1. A Digression on Mythography 170 2. Youth of Galileo 172 3· The Church and the Copernican System 174 4· Early Quarrels 178 5· The Impact of the Telescope 184 6.