Kepler in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century "reduced to order the chaos of data" left by Tycho Brahe, and added to them just the thing that was needed—mathematical genius. Like Copernicus he created another world-system which, since it did not ultimately prevail, merely remains as a strange monument of colossal intellectual power working on insufficient materials; and even more than Copernicus he was driven by semi-religious fervour—a passion to uncover the magic of mere numbers and to demonstrate the music of the spheres. ...He has to his credit a collection of discoveries and conclusions—some of them more ingenious than useful—from which we today can pick out three that have a permanent importance in the history of astronomy.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Kepler in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century "reduced to order the chaos of data" left by Tycho Brahe, and added to them just the thing that was needed—mathematical genius. Like Copernicus he created another world-system which, since it did not ultimately prevail, merely remains as a strange monument of colossal intellectual power working on insufficient materials; and even more than Copernicus he was driven by semi-religious fervour—a passion to uncover the magic of mere numbers and to demonstrate the music of the spheres. ...He has to his credit a collection of discoveries and conclusions—some of them more ingenious than useful—from which we today can pick out three that have a permanent importance in the history of astronomy." in the context of "Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.