Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.
— Blaise Pascal, in Pensées (1658)
One year before meeting with Tycho Brahe in 1600, Johannes Kepler had determined to make use of the Danish nobleman’s highly valuable astronomical instruments. He revealed his game plan in a letter to his mentor:
Any single instrument of his cost more than my and my whole family’s fortune put together…. My opinion of Tycho is this: he is superlatively rich, but he knows not how to make proper use of it as is the case with most rich people. Therefore, one must try to wrest his riches from him.
The “riches” young Kepler was writing about bitterly referred to the instruments Tycho Brahe used for his heavenly observations. And had Kepler not succeeded in getting hold of Tycho’s treasure, he could never have discovered his historic planetary laws. Furthermore, Isaac Newton was born only twelve years after Kepler’s death, and without the planetary laws he could not have arrived at his monumentally important synthesis. No doubt somebody else would have done so (if Newton hadn’t), but it is at least possible that the scientific revolution would have carried different metaphysical undertones if it had been fathered not by an English empiricist, but, say, a Frenchman with Thomist inclinations, or a German mystic.
The point of such speculation is, in part, to insert a question mark against the supposed logical inevitability and…