Acknowledging Kepler as his “favorite astronomer,” Gingerich openly admired his religious reverence. A devout Lutheran, Kepler had planned to enter the ministry before his superiors redirected his career. Later he thanked God—repeatedly and in print—for leading him to his astronomical insights. His coat of arms bore an angel. He believed the earth had a soul.
Just as Gingerich praised Kepler’s prayers, the atheists in Zielona Gora all forgave Kepler for them, since he never invoked the intervention of a deity to get himself out of a difficulty. As Kepler interpreted the laws of God and Nature, Creation ended on the sixth day. After that, only math could guide the seeker’s path to Truth.
No sooner had Kepler finished writing his Somnium (his Dream, in which he pondered the appearance of Earth as viewed from a perch on the moon) than he fell, according to his son Ludwig, “into a sleep (alas!) that was heavy, or rather fatal. His soul flew above the lunar to the ethereal region (we hope).” Jaroslaw Wlodarczyk of the Institute for the History of Science in Warsaw noted that another Kepler will retrace that sub- to supra-lunar trajectory next February, when NASA launches the Kepler mission, designed by modern dreamers to find Earth-like planets elsewhere in the Milky Way.
