Was Tycho Brahe Murdered by a Contract Killer?

[Ichingcarpenter]

Over 400 years after the death of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, scientists in Prague are preparing to exhume his body. Was Europe's most renowned scholar poisoned with mercury? A Danish scholar claims to have decoded the murderer's diary.

Walls of people formed to watch a funeral procession pass through the streets of Prague on Nov. 4, 1601. A herald carrying a billowing damask flag was followed by 12 imperial guards bearing a coffin covered with black satin. The man inside wore a full suit of armor.

Tycho Brahe, the brilliant observer of the stars in the Renaissance, was being carried to his grave. The scholar had systematically measured the sky, paving the way for science in the modern age. In 1573 he became the first person to describe a supernova, the explosion of a star.

The truth didn't begin to emerge until 1991. The Prague National Museum, which has Brahe's moustache in its collection, sent a few of the hairs to Denmark. Lab tests revealed mercury levels more than 100 times above normal.

Five years later, physicists at the University of Lund presented the results of another study, this time using a proton microprobe. The famous scholar had swallowed the heavy metal all at once, about 13 hours before his death.

Was he poisoned? US expert Joshua Gilder believes an assassin used mercuric chloride, which he dripped into Brahe's glass. A few drops would have been fatal........snip

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,601729,00.html


They are gonna dig him up to see if he was murdered. Tycho, who had a gold nose, was a giant
in the field of astronomy...... The article goes through all the suspects.

[1620rock]

1. Wow, interesting. Thanks for posting,

"Tycho, who had a gold nose" What and how was that?

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. And a Pet Moose

A detailed account of the nose incident can also be found in the book "Tycho Brahe, the man and his work" (original in latin), by Pierre Gassendi 1654. This book was translated to swedish and commented by Wilhelm Norlind, 1951.

Gassendi writes:

"The 10th of december 1566 there was a dance at Lucas Bacmeisters house in the connection to a wedding. Lucas Bacmeister was a professor of theology at the univeristy of Rostock where Tycho studied. Among the guests were Tycho Brahe and another danish nobleman, Manderup Parsberg. They started an argument and they separated in anger. The 27th of december this argument started again, and in the evening of the 29th of december a duel was held. It was around 7 in the evening and in darkness. Parsberg gives Tycho a cut over his nose that took away almost the front part of his nose. Tycho had an artificial nose made, not from wax, but from an alloy of gold and silver<*> and put it on so skillfully, that it looked like a real nose Wilhelm Janszoon Blaeu, who spent time with Tycho for nearly two years, also said that Tycho used to carry a small box with a paste or glue, with which he often would put on the nose."

Gassendi also writes that Laurus (a professor in Perugia, and later protonotarius for the pope) gives the reason for the argument between Tycho and Parsberg in one of his letters. The reason should have been an argument about who was most skilled in mathmatics. However, Norlind points out that Gassendi has either received a wrong account of this letter, or misinterpreted it, because Laurus only writes that "Not so long ago, Tycho Brahe and a danish nobleman had competed in studying mathematics and other higher sciences". There is nothing mentioned however that this should have been the reason for the argument and later the duel. Gassendis statement that it was an argument about who was the most skilled mathematician has however been cited many times in later biographies.

http://www.nada.kth.se/~fred/tycho/nose.html


Story about the moose there too.

[Starry Messenger]

4. I knew about the nose but not the moose.

Thank you for posting these. Great reads! I'll be interested to know the results of their findings.

[soothsayer]

2. So the story that he died from that drinking game (where the first one to pee loses) busted bladder

is a lie?

[BlooInBloo]

5. (shrug) Galieo got Brahe's data.

[surrealAmerican]

6. "The Prague National Museum, which has Brahe's moustache...

... in its collection"? Is this a collection of Brahe's effects, or a collection of famous moustaches?

[Ichingcarpenter]

7. Some say that Shakespeare took his character

and used it in his plays in Hamlet.

characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Astrophysicist Finds New Scientific Meaning
in Hamlet


The paper, by Peter D. Usher, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, presents evidence that Hamlet is "an allegory for the competition between the cosmological models of Thomas Digges of England and Tycho Brahe of Denmark." Usher says the paper is significant because Shakespeare favors the Diggesian model, which is the forerunner of modern cosmology. "As early as 1601, Shakespeare anticipated the new universal order and humankind's position in it," Usher states. "The play therefore manifests an astronomical cosmology that is no less magnificent than its literary and philosophical counterparts."

Claudius Ptolemy perfected a model of the universe in the second century A.D. that remained the standard model into the sixteenth century. In this model, the Earth was stationary at the center of the universe and everything else revolved around it. In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus of Poland published a revolutionary model (which is essentially the one in use today) in which the Earth rotates on its axis once a day and is merely one of several planets that revolve about the Sun. Though the Copernican model had been published before Shakespeare was born, it was not yet in vogue in his lifetime.

However, both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems were contained in a crystalline sphere, beyond which lay Paradise and the realm of the Prime Mover. By contrast, in 1576 when Shakespeare was 12 years old, the English scientist and military scholar Thomas Digges extended the Copernican model by suggesting that the stars were like the Sun and were distributed through infinite space. He was therefore the first Renaissance scholar to publish the idea of an infinite universe. Eight years later similar ideas were published in a book by the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno.

Shakespeare would have known of the existence of these competing cosmological models through his acquaintance with Digges. "Through Digges, Shakespeare knew also of the astronomer Tycho Brahe, and he named the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for Tycho's ancestors," the paper states. Tycho's model of the universe was similar to Ptolemy's in two major ways: it was Earth centered, and it too was imbedded in a spherical shell of stars.

This paper suggests that Hamlet dramatizes the struggle of Renaissance scholars to discover the real picture of the universe from the appearances in the sky. "When Hamlet states: 'I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space . . . ' he is contrasting the shell of fixed stars in the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models with the Infinite Universe of Digges," Usher says.






http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Hamlet.html

[comrade snarky]

8. Could be both

Maybe Brahe had a collection of mustaches!