A THREAD TO MEASURE THE COSMOS

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There was a child to whom religious education made him lonely and distrustful, and he always thought that he was full of sins and then he struggled to achieve the salvation of his soul.

To achieve this, he thought he should study the greatest thing that, according to him, God had done: The cosmos, the immensity of the night with its stars and planets.

Over time, he became a professor of mathematics, but he was a failure: nobody understood him, and he was entangled and grumpy ... and soon he ran out of students.

To complete, his mathematical statements were not to the liking of the church and he had to flee to escape the inquisition.

His mother also, a woman of more than seventy years, spent several years imprisoned and chained, accused of witchcraft and was about to be taken to the stake.

This man was called Johaness Kepler, great German astronomer. He never had money, he had a precarious health, and his marriage was not the happiest...

And even so, he calculated the orbit of the planets and their travel around the sun.
All his equipment was a piece of thread and a fragment of metal at one end, which he held with his arm stretched, for many hours, many nights over many years, to be able to calculate the impossible.

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With that piece of thread Kepler discovered, for example, that the planets revolved around the sun, not describing a circle, but an ellipse.

These and other discoveries overturned wrong claims that were believed to be true for more than two thousand years.

Kepler was dying on a day like today, November 15, 1639. And although submerged in the night of time and silence, the planets, in their everlasting movement, proclaim his glory and his talent.

This story was originally written by my friend Ramiro Díez in Diario EL TELÉGRAFO under the following address: http://www.radiolavida.com/ramirodiez/15-de-noviembre/#sthash.oCbBV3mG.dpbs If you are going to use it, please quote our source and place a link to the original note. www.eltelegrafo.com.ec