Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the relationship between astronomy and human curiosity about the future, suggesting that scientific pursuits can be driven by societal desires.
Johannes Kepler's quote highlights the connection between the scientific field of astronomy and the human inclination to seek knowledge about the future. It suggests that while the study of celestial bodies may not have direct practical benefits, it is fueled by people's wishes to find meaning and predictions through the stars, showcasing how human aspirations and the quest for knowledge can inspire scientific inquiry.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of scientific inquiry, one might quote Kepler to illustrate how human curiosity drives research.
...Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.
A most unfailing experience... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.
We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.
I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.
Eyesight should learn from reason.
I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]
We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.
If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.
We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.
Let's not spend resources that we don't need to be sending astronauts back to the moon. Let's not spend expensive resources on bringing people who have reached Mars back again. Prepare them to become a growing colony.
A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
It seemed, indeed, that the study of light-scattering might carry one into the deepest problems of physics and chemistry, and it was this belief which led to the subject becoming the main theme of our activities at Calcutta from that time onwards.
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