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Open AccessArticle

Could There Be Method Behind Kepler’s Cosmic Music?

by Paul Redding

Histories 2025, 5(2), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/histories5020016 - 27 Mar 2025

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While Kepler is regarded as a major figure in standard historical accounts of the scientific revolution of early modern Europe, he is typically seen as having one foot in the new scientific culture and one in the old. In some of his work, Kepler appears, along with Galileo, to be on a trajectory towards Newton’s celestial mechanics. In addition to his advocacy of Copernicus’s heliocentrism, he appealed to physical causes in his explanations of the movements of celestial bodies. But other work appears to express a neo-Platonic “metaphysics” or “mysticism”, as most obvious in his embrace of the ancient tradition of the “music of the spheres”. Here I problematize this distinction. The musical features of Kepler’s purported neo-Platonic “metaphysics”, I argue, was also tied to Platonic and neo-Platonic features of the methodology of a tradition of mathematical astronomy that would remain largely untouched by his shift to heliocentrism and that would be essential to his actual scientific practice. Importantly, certain features of the geometric practices he inherited—ones later formalized as “projective geometry”—would also carry those “harmonic” structures expressed in the thesis of the music of the spheres. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section History of Knowledge)

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Open AccessArticle

ASTROLABE: A Rigorous, Geodetic-Oriented Data Model for Trajectory Determination Systems

by José A. Navarro, M. Eulàlia Parés, Ismael Colomina and Marta Blázquez

ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2017, 6(4), 98; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi6040098 - 28 Mar 2017

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4654

Abstract

The constant irruption of new sensors is a challenge for software systems that do not rely on generic data models able to manage change or innovation. Several data modeling standards exist. Some of these address the problem from a generic perspective but are far too complex for the kind of applications targeted by this work, while others focus strictly on specific kinds of sensors. These approaches pose a problem for the maintainability of software systems dealing with sensor data. This work presents ASTROLABE, a generic and extensible data model specifically devised for trajectory determination systems working with sensors whose error distributions may be fully modeled using means and covariance matrices. A data model relying on four fundamental entities (observation, state, instrument, mathematical model) and related metadata is described; two compliant specifications (for file storage and network communications) are presented; a portable C++ library implementing these specifications is also briefly introduced. STROLABE, integrated in CTTC’s trajectory determination system NAVEGA, has been extensively used since 2009 in research and production (real-life) projects, coping successfully with a significant variety of sensors. Such experience helped to improve the data model and validate its suitability for the target problem. The authors are considering putting ASTROLABE in the public domain. Full article

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