Thank you for all of the well wishes! Along with their congratulations, a lot of friends and family have asked us why and how we chose the name Kepler for our little guy.
Kepler is the namesake of Johannes Kepler, a 17th-century natural scientist and astronomer who made significant advances in our understanding of the universe. He was preceded by a decade or so by Copernicus, contemporary with Tycho Brahe and Galileo Galilei, and followed a few years later by Isaac Newton. In 1600, Kepler believed that he had discovered God’s geometric plan for the universe, where he had nested platonic solids one inside the other to describe the orbits of the planets. As one story goes, when he found out that the planets revolved in ellipses rather than perfect circles, he cried. Kepler’s best known for this later discovery, his laws of planetary motion.
First light from Kepler's photometer, April 2009.
A few weeks after we decided on the name, Jeremy kept hearing “Kepler” around the science desk at the New York Times. NASA was preparing to launch Kepler, their new space telescope, in search of other earth-sized planets in our galaxy. Kepler’s firsts, taken from NASA’s Kepler Mission Page:
In his book Astronomia Pars Optica, for which he earned the title of founder of modern optics he was the:
- First to investigate the formation of pictures with a pin hole camera;
- First to explain the process of vision by refraction within the eye;
- First to formulate eyeglass designing for nearsightedness and farsightedness;
- First to explain the use of both eyes for depth perception.
In his book Dioptrice (a term coined by Kepler and still used today) he was the:
- First to describe: real, virtual, upright and inverted images and magnification;
- First to explain the principles of how a telescope works;
- First to discover and describe the properties of total internal reflection.
In addition:
- His book Stereometrica Doliorum formed the basis of integral calculus.
- First to explain that the tides are caused by the Moon (Galileo reproved him for this).
- Tried to use stellar parallax caused by the Earth’s orbit to measure the distance to the stars; the same principle as depth perception. Today this branch of research is called astrometry.
- First to suggest that the Sun rotates about its axis in Astronomia Nova
- First to derive the birth year of Christ, that is now universally accepted.
- First to derive logarithms purely based on mathematics, independent of Napier’s tables published in 1614.
- He coined the word “satellite” in his pamphlet Narratio de Observatis a se quatuor Iovis sattelitibus erronibus
It’s a lot to live up to, but Kepler’s already started his own firsts and his own discoveries. Like many parents, we named him with a nod to our hopes, and our hope is that he will take that spirit of exploration and a love for the world and for the universe as far as he possibly can.
