The importance of observing and measuring the heavens helped stimulate the development of accurate instruments such as the astrolabe – a treatise on the subject by Geoffrey Chaucer was the standard reference work throughout the middle ages. Astrological calculations by the ancient Babylonians led them to make new discoveries in geometry. There’s no doubt too that astrology had useful spin-offs, much like those often claimed for big science projects such as the Apollo missions and the Large Hadron Collider. As for planets, he says, in early times “the motivation for planetary observations had always been astrology”. “The sun, moon and stars were useful for navigation,” Boxer tells me. As well as discovering planetary motion, he was an astrologer. A statue of Johannes Kepler in Linz, where he taught mathematics.
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