« ... Tyge Brahe, in Latin Tycho, was born in Denmark in 1546 and died in 1601. Patronized by Frederick II of Denmark, he was granted, by the King, the island of Hven in the strait of Copenhagen, together with an appointment, that allowed him great autonomy for his studies and his researches. He was economically well off and could afford to build a castle, an observatory with laboratories and even to put up a private printing house. For twenty years, from 1576 to 1597, he devoted himself to planetary observation with the help of many assistants.  

Unfortunately, the successor of Frederick II was not so generous, therefore Brahe moved over to the imperial court of Rudolph II, a court in which the best minds of those times found great hospitality. Here, he lived in an exciting cultural environment free from censorship ties and far away from the dictates of the Counter Reformation (61).  

No progress had been realized in the astronomical field, since Copernicus. Somebody, therefore, started to formulate the need to approach matters in a different way. Brahe understood the necessity to make new planetary observations and considered of great importance the building of instruments that could improve and enhance both the perception and the human limits. He had a very open attitude for the times that encouraged him to build instruments of great size and precision. With the help of such instruments, it was possible to achieve information and data that proved fundamental for those that came next.  

To give rise to a correct vision of the universe, he assumed it was necessary to start from hypotheses, but he never accepted the theories of Copernicus. In fact, he hastily debated with Rothmann, a supporter of Copernicus (62), both on the Earth’s motion and on the gravitation of bodies, as he was convinced the Earth was stationary.  

He neither accepted the Ptolemaic system, as his observations of the planet Mars at opposition, convinced him that Mars was indeed nearer the Earth than the Sun was, which set him in conflict with the Ptolemaic theory, that asserted the opposite.  

However, as asserted by Dreyer, his system was identical to the Copernicus’s one and all the calculations of the planetary positions were same. (63)  

He is considered, indeed, a man of compromise: he kept the Earth in the centre of the universe, a static object, in accordance with the Holy Writ, which represented for him the only and indisputable truth (64), while the five planets (65) orbited the Sun. Therefore, it was not the Tychonic system that upset and modified the course of the future events, but the attention he paid to comets, which had not been taken into consideration by the astronomers until then.  

Of great importance was the study he carried out on the motion of a comet in 1577. The objective difficulty to calculate its small parallax, forced him to believe that the distance of this comet was greater than the distance of Venus. An extraordinary result, that allowed these phenomena to become themselves celestial bodies, exploding the Aristotle’s theory that considered them simple atmospheric phenomena.  

He was, therefore, convinced that this comet, orbiting the Sun and Venus externally, was superlunary and that during its motion it intersected the trajectories of the other planets.  

This thesis implied the final downfall of traditional cosmology that conceived the idea that the planet’s motion was supported by crystalline spheres that physically really existed. As such, he surpassed Copernicus, who, instead, supported this theory. 

Additionally, also the celestial motion, exclusively conceived as a circular motion, a dogma of the theories of Aristotle, collapsed, as Tycho asserted that the comet moved and created an "oblong figure" (66), therefore an oval. The importance of this consideration was remarkable, as the circular motion was a synonym of universal perfection.  

For the observer the philosophical tradition was no more an obstacle, both the Neoplatonism of Copernicus and the Aristotelism of Ptolemy vanished.  

Also the last obstacle of the hypotheses that crystallized the history of astronomy and hampered its development in the past times, was knocked down.  

Technology and observation are the winners, not because through them it becomes possible to discover the truth, but because they give life to a new attitude that in future will become fruitful. The "homo novus", the scientist, is now an observer, that uses technology and starts to work with instruments to overcome his physical and biological limits.  

In Brahe, once again we find the great philosophical contribution of the Renaissance, the scientific thought means putting together many experimental data … » 
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