Tycho in the Times

The banner headline on the front cover of the Times is about Tycho Brahe - now that must be a first! The headline reads "Tycho Brahe: Superstar of 1572" and there is a large article on page 4. This relates to the supernova of that year and the recent discovery of light echoes from the 1572 blast. The article features the famous picture on Tycho in his observatory with the huge graduated scale and it gave the paper the chance to write about Tycho's golden nose - it even mentions Kepler.

This does give me another good excuse to put lots of pictures up on this blog!

There are loads of portraits of Tycho - he was, afterall, a rich nobleman

The Times uses a colour picture of this scene for its story today

Statue of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler (my hero) - presumably in Prague?

Rather nice illustration of Tycho's model of the universe - for one small period, the most believed model of the heavens (maybe 30-50 years?)

This was described as being a photo of the "Tycho pavement mosaic" - I have no idea what it is

After reading Leonardo's paper on the Duhem-Quine thesis, I was inspired to write my own, thus getting rid of the last PH400 essay due this term. Mine is based more on a book I read years ago from the mid-1970s, Can Theories be Refuted? I re-titled the essay to make it more about science and argued that the D-Q thesis can be avoided by appraising conjunctions of theories. It is not a very good idea as such, but it does explain why scientists do not labour over devising auxiliary hypotheses to explain away falsifications, and why "crucial experiments" do sometimes seem to occur in the history of science.