Back from Prague
Originally uploaded by hzenilc.
Amazing… looking for a cybercafe located close to the Charles Bridge I stumbled upon Johannes Kepler’s home in Prague from the time when he was invited there by Tycho Brahe. The building now standing is not that old so it may not be the original one in which Kepler lived. But he actively worked in the Czech capital for twelve years, from 1600 to 1612, when he formulated his 3 laws of planetary motion. There are 2 plaques at the location, one on the facade of the building, and the other inside, in the entrance passageway. At the center of the passageway is a monument representing the planetary orbits. Tourists and other passersby completely fail to notice either the plaques or the monument.
If you would like to brush up on Kepler’s laws, I wrote a popular science article some years ago for the National University of Mexico (UNAM), which is available here (in Spanish). My final paper (mémoire du cours) for one of my master’s courses– “History of Physics”– at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm) was an analysis of some of the most obscure passages in Kepler’s “Mysterium Cosmographicum” which I especially like for its proposal that the distance relationships between the planets could be understood in terms of the Platonic solids (which by the way turned out to be a good approximation).
Even though I took many pictures (among them pictures of the plaques and the monument which I will provide upon request to anyone who may be interested) I couldn’t imagine a better picture to post here than the one I took of the celebrated and beautiful Prague astronomical clock on the Old Town Hall. It is unique in being the oldest clock operating on its original clockwork–from the time of its construction to the present, a total of six centuries. Even the astronomical dial shaped like an astrolabe survives in its original form. More information about it is available at Wikipedia here. The clock was operational many years before Kepler was born, so looking at it I wondered how many times he would have stood contemplating it during his time in Prague. For my part I dined every day for a whole week at the Prince Hotel from where I could easily admire both the clock and the awesome gothic-style Tyn’s Church.
The close-up of the clock appearing here in my blog and in Wikipedia (currently) was taken by me on February 22nd 2007 and released, together with other photos on the same page, under a Creative Commons license. So do help yourself if you like any of them.
My complete picture gallery from Prague is here.
The Czech word for clock is “Orloj,” from the French “horloge”. Czech is rather interesting in that despite being a Slavic language and thus closely related to Russian, it, like Slovak and Polish, uses the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic.
An intriguing fact about declensions in such languages is that in almost all cases all permutations of words in a clause are possible and have different meanings. So one can generate phrases by combinatorial means and produce sentences that actually make sense!
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