On March 6, 2009, NASA launched the Kepler Mission. This scientific mission is designed to find Earth-like planets orbiting other Sun-like stars in Earth's "neighborhood" of the solar system. The name for this mission is particularly apt given that Johannes Kepler put forth theories about planetary motion and their relationship to their star and each other in a heliocentric solar system that were revolutionary in their time, and which have stood up in the centuries since that time. Kepler's own life was complicated-his mother was accused of being a witch, and he was sensitive to the criticism that he faced in his work. He was a Protestant, which meant that he was not subject to the same ecumenical pressure that the Vatican could bring to bear on Catholic scientists, but he knew that he was proposing ideas that raised challenging religious as well as scientific questions. This research considers recent literature regarding Kepler and his work, and the insights that the literature provides regarding this important pioneer of planetary exploration.
Dorman considers the way that three authors address the issue of error in an essay that analyzes the approaches of Mark Twain, C. S. Lewis and Kepler. Lewis wrote from a religious perspective while Twain was often in open warfare against religion. Kepler's writings were scientific in their approach, and his work was nonfiction compared to the other two writers who also wrote much later in history when the sacred and the secular were far more separated than in Kepler's time. Dorman points out that Kepler wrote Astronomia nova in a convoluted manner that included the many paths into "barren thickets" of missteps and errors that Kepler encountered before he arrived at his final conclusion. In this way, according to Dorman, Kepler sought to anticipate and refute arguments from critics in order to strengthen his own position and make his argument less vulnerable (Dorman 46)....