Monday 14 December 2009

Field on Kepler, contact with Caroline

In a desire to continue the flurry of Kepler related study, I have been reading Judith Field's Kepler's Geometrical Cosmology. This is a complex work, more mathematical than many, focusing on Mysterium Cosmographicum and Harmonice Mundi. It is also a very coherantly argued book, which a whole series of connected ideas that work very well together. Field clearly has the necessary mathematics to tackle these works, which is quite unusual. I have just about finished up to the end of the discussion of M-C and was considering leaving H-M for a few more days. But you never know, it might be good to rattle off the entire book.

I had an email from Caroline, my friend on last year's MSc course. As I suspected, she and Felix are now living in Germany (Hamburg). She didn't say exactly how her MSc had gone but she evidently doesn't have to retake anything. I had hoped she might have circulated her dissertation as others had, but she didn't - a shame as her topic was one I would have liked to have read about.

My aim in contacting her had been to see if she was still interested in doing any translation work. I didn't tell her much about my plans, but I have been thinking about how best to check my own work. So if I get accepted to the PhD programme, I had wanted to devise some sort of translation plan for myself and for others to review my work. Caroline can do both Latin and German into English. Not sure yet what to ask her about in detail. For instance, should I just have her look at passages that I have struggled with, or maybe let her loose on some German that I won't be looking at?

No doubt this will all become clearer in the future as I think about it more (hopefully once I have been accepted)

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