In Part 2 of Dean Regas’ investigation into the mysterious death of astronomer Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler is the prime suspect. Is the 400-year-old mystery finally solved? Science writer Dava Sobel, astronomy educator Matthias Schmitt and WVXU newsroom members Tana Weingartner, Maryanne Zeleznik, Becca Costello, Bill Rinehart, and Jennifer Merritt join the search for answers.
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Episode Transcript: Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: Last time on “Looking Up” ...
Voice 1 (Tana Weingartner): Tycho Brahe was an astronomer full of life one moment...
Voice 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): But left a dinner party in tremendous distress.
Voice 3 (Jennifer Merritt): And in a few days. He was dead.
Tycho Brahe (Bill Rinehart): “May I not seem to have lived in vain.”
Dean Regas: And here you have Johannes Kepler, who had been wanting Tycho’s closely guarded secrets. To discover the true motions of the heavens.
Voice 3 (Jennifer Merritt): Tycho dies and then Kepler gets possession of the precious data. The universe is now in Kepler’s hands.
Voice 4 (Becca Costello): Tycho’s death was sudden, and definitely odd. Some say suspicious.
Dean Regas: But was it murder? And if so, who did it and how?
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I’m your host, Dean Regas, and this is “Looking Up”!
The show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
Tonight we conclude a 400-year-old mystery. Who killed the astronomer Tycho Brahe? And we have new information to share in the ongoing investigation.
Voice 4 (Becca Costello): I mean, they dug up Tycho Brahe’s body, and you’ll never guess what they found...
Dean Regas: Oct. 24, 1601. Prague. The imperial court was in turmoil as their storied, albeit eccentric astronomer Tycho Brahe lay dead.
His final words that he kept repeating over and over still echoed off the walls:
Tycho Brahe (Bill Rinehart): “Ne frustra vixisse videar.”
Dean Regas: Meaning “May I not seem to have lived in vain.”
His assistant, whom Brahe did not fully trust, Johannes Kepler, gave a detailed account of his boss’s ailment and final, agonizing days.
Voice 1 (Tana Weingartner): In Kepler’s expert opinion, Brahe drank too much at a dinner party where he was a guest. As etiquette of the time demands, a guest cannot be excused to relieve himself before the host.
Voice 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): So Brahe waited and waited and held it in and held it in until...
Voice 1 (Tana Weingartner): He missed his window.
Dava Sobel: And here’s Tycho crossing his legs and being very polite and all this stuff. And that is the story is that he held it too long and that eventually caused his death. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that he would have put up with that given his personality.
Dean Regas: That’s author and historian Dava Sobel, who’s studied this “case” extensively. Kepler describes how upon returning home, Brahe couldn’t pee. Or at least not much. Brahe couldn’t sleep, couldn’t excrete. He was in intense pain. And finally, after 11 days, he died.
Kepler diagnosed it as a bladder infection or maybe his bladder burst. Either way, it seemed a strange way to die. Even Brahe must have thought so from his self-written epitaph.
Tycho Brahe (Bill Rinehart): “He lived like a sage and died like a fool.”
Dean Regas: Still talking about yourself in the third person, even up until death, eh?
Tycho Brahe (Bill Rinehart): Ya. It was the fashion for us Renaissance astronomers.
Dean Regas: Sage or fool, there’s no denying Tycho Brahe was as eccentric as astronomers come. But what about his assistant? What was he like? Let’s learn a little more about Johannes Kepler.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): Hi, my name is Johannes Kepler, and I was conceived May 17, 1571, ... at 4:37 a.m.
Dean Regas: That is an actual thing Kepler wrote. In fact, he wrote a lot about himself. And just like Tycho Brahe, often in the third person.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): Ya, that’s where Tycho got that. From me. I mean he. What was Kepler saying? Oh, yes ...
“Kepler has in all respects the nature of a dog ... He likes to gnaw bones ... He is greedy, he tears up whatever he sees ... He tenaciously pursues those who act badly. He gets angry and is scathing towards others. He hates many people a lot. He shies away from baths.”
Dean Regas: With Kepler, what you see is what you get.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): “Whatever I say outwardly, that I believe inwardly.”
Dean Regas: First person this time. Nice ... Kepler was born in Weil der Stadt near today’s Stuttgart, Germany. His Protestant family had definitely seen better days, and his upbringing was rough to say the least. Again, Kepler honestly described his parents thusly:
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): My father was a mercenary soldier, “... a man vicious, inflexible, quarrelsome and doomed to a bad end.”
My mother was the daughter of an innkeeper, “small, thin, swarthy, gossiping, quarrelsome, of a bad disposition.”
Dean Regas: In fact, his dad was largely absent from the family fighting in various wars far from home. Until he died in some war or other. Or possibly he just decided to never come back home again.
Kepler described his difficult childhood with his many ailments.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): I was small, sickly, had poor eyesight, double vision, rashes and was continually bullied by others.
Dean Regas: But he displayed an uncanny mind for math and won a scholarship to attend the University of Tubingen, where he felt the clashes of culture and classism even more.
At Tubingen, a professor of math named Michael Maestlin introduced Kepler to the Copernican system, the newly proposed and much-maligned theory that the Earth and planets went around the sun.
Voice 3 (Jennifer Merritt): Absurd nonsense!
Voice 1 (Tana Weingartner): I mean, come on. The Earth? Moving? Ridiculous.
Dean Regas: Anyway, Copernicus was extremely unpopular but appealed to the young outsider in Kepler. Kepler dove into the heliocentric theory and became its primary advocate. In fact, he wanted to improve it.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): “My aim is to show that the heavenly machine is not a kind of divine, living being, but a kind of clockwork ...”
Dean Regas: But unlike Tycho Brahe, Kepler had to work and scrap for everything. He wrote books, with mixed reviews. Did odd teaching jobs. Struggled with debt. Even when he got married, he qualified it ominously.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): “Under calamitous skies.”
Dean Regas: He did astrological charts to pay the bills. He even had to defend his mother from being executed as a witch.
Voice 4 (Becca Costello): Kepler’s mother, Katharina, was a widowed and independent citizen who dabbled in a lot of side businesses.
Voice 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): A neighbor accused Katharina of making her ill from a drink she offered. Then others came forward with tall witchy tales.
Voice 3 (Jennifer Merritt): She was arrested and imprisoned for more than a year. And remained completely defiant. When asked if she was sorry and remorseful, she replied:
Katharina Kepler (Tana Weingartner): “I’ve cried so many tears in my life. I just don’t have any left.”
Voice 4 (Becca Costello): She was possibly only spared because her son, Johannes, famous astronomer to the emperor, mounted a stirring, and some say scientific, defense.
Dean Regas: The defense worked and Katharina avoided the fate of so many accused of witchcraft in the 17th century.
Dean Regas: Kepler slowly gains a reputation as one of the smartest mathematical minds around.
So, in 1600, when Tycho Brahe set out to put his mass of astronomical data in order and publish the book of all books, who did he call to help him?
Tycho Brahe (Bill Rinehart): Johannes Kepler.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): He accepts!
Dava Sobel: Kepler was obviously brilliant and interested, and one always needs a gifted assistant. So that was probably his appeal. And for Kepler, Brahe had the observations that nobody else had. And Kepler was the first person really looking for a physical explanation, looking for forces that explained the universe. Whereas before him, as I understand it, people were pretty much content with geometry.
Dava Sobel: I think the tension existed even before Kepler got there because Kepler had a correspondence, wrote a flattering letter to one of Tycho’s main competitors. And that letter got published. So Tycho knew about it. And then he’s confronted with this same person who was nice to his enemy. That couldn’t have started things well. And Tycho’s ideas, data had been stolen before, so he was wary.
Dean Regas: Kepler also wrote this:
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): “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.”
Dean Regas: Taken out of context, Kepler’s words seem damning. How far would he go for the riches? Murder? Was it a confession of sorts with a motive as old as time: money?
Dava Sobel: He just wasn’t that sort of person who would kill someone for information. Just can’t imagine that.
Dean Regas: The riches Kepler is referring to are most likely the astronomical data that Brahe compiled. Brahe was holding it back and only let Kepler see bits and pieces but never the whole thing.
Tycho Brahe (Bill Rinehart): Do I trust Kepler? No. Do I need him? Yes.
Dean Regas: Then Brahe dies.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): Of a burst bladder.
Dean Regas: Sure, Kepler, whatever you say. One thing is certain: After Brahe’s death, Kepler gets exactly what he wants. All the riches, I mean data, about the positions of the planets. Mars was the key, and Brahe’s accurate measurements allowed Kepler to prove a theory that changed our notions of the universe forever.
Kepler proves that the sun is in the center of the solar system, but the planets, well, let’s let him describe his three laws:
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): Planets travel around the sun in elliptical orbits.
Dean Regas: Not circles like Copernicus and everyone else had. Oh, sorry, continue.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): A line drawn from the center of the sun to the center of a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time.
Dean Regas: Meaning a planet changes its speed and distance around the sun. Right?
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): Ya. And three: The ratio of the square of a planet’s orbital period is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the sun.
Dean Regas: So, with a few accurate observations, you could compute the orbit of any planet around the sun, any comet, any spacecraft, anything.
As the years and centuries passed, the mystery remained. What really happened to Tycho Brahe? I mean, the story just seemed too strange. Even for him!
Voice 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): In 1901 scientists exhumed and autopsied Tycho’s body.
Voice 4 (Becca Costello): What they found was it wasn’t a kidney stone and wasn’t a lot of other things. So, they couldn’t argue against the burst bladder theory.
Dean Regas: Oh, come on! Really? So, after further discussion among modern scientists, in the 1990s mercury poisoning was suggested. Ooh, now that sounds more like murder perhaps. But who did it?
Voice 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): Kepler was high on the suspect list.
Voice 3 (Jennifer Merritt): As was ... his cousin Erik Brahe. Who perhaps killed him under orders from the king of Denmark for an alleged affair between Tycho and the king’s mother.
Dean Regas: Wait, what? Seriously? Man, the astronomical gossip was intense!
So, in 2010 they dug him up again. And tested him again. And found ...
Voice 1 (Tana Weingartner): No significant levels of mercury. Nothing anywhere close to lethal, that’s for sure. So, he was not poisoned. And the authorities concluded it was not murder.
Dean Regas: Kepler was off the hook. As was Tycho’s cousin, apparently.
So, what killed Tycho Brahe? What say you, scientists of the 21st century? What does modern science tell us?
Tycho Brahe most likely died of ... a burst bladder. Just what Kepler thought in 1601!
Voice 3 (Jennifer Merritt): Can you hold your pee that long to burst your bladder?
Dean Regas: Apparently so. Let that be a lesson to all you kids out there. If you gotta go, go.
But the mind boggles with the possibilities. If Tycho Brahe didn’t hold it for so long and died, would Kepler ever have figured out the motions of the planets and pretty much everything in the solar system?
Something tells me that Tycho was gonna die strangely at some point, kidnapped by pirates, nose poisoning, a pet elk falling on him. Something.
And then Kepler would’ve merely been delayed. Kepler lived until 1630, so another 29 years to explore and describe the universe. He wrote the most accurate astronomical book of his day, “Astronomia Nova,” as well as his three laws that we all learned in high school. And then finished his masterpiece, the “Rudolphine Tables,” where he basically outlined where every planet was going to be for, well, forever. Not bad for a poor, sickly kid from Germany. And hey, he wasn’t a murderer either!
Dean Regas: “Looking Up With Dean Regas” is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017. Ella Rowen and Carlos Lopez Cornu produce and edit our show and are totally obsessed with Johannes Kepler now.
Special thanks to our voice actors for this episode: Bill Rinehart, Maryanne Zeleznik, Tana Weingartner, Jennifer Merrit and Becca Costello. And Matthias Schmitt, who played Kepler using a Swabian accent from Kepler’s home region in Germany. Of course, huge thanks to our guest expert Dava Sobel, who lent some much-needed professionalism.
Jenell Walton is our vice president of content, and Ronny Salerno is our digital platforms manager. Our theme song is “Possible Light” by Ziv Moran. And our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany.
I’m Dean Regas. Keep looking up!
