Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Born sickly and poor. Smart: got scholarships. Became Lutheran
minister; learned Copernicus. Went to work with Tycho to escape 30 Years
War.
Tycho withheld important data until he died in 1601. Kepler proposed geometrical heliocentric
model with imbedded polygons (clever and aesthetic, but not better). With full Mars data, Kepler
found his laws of planetary motion in 1605 and published in 1609. Had to keep moving
around, but kept publishing better predictions of planetary positions, which
were confirmed
observationally.
A recent note: it turns out that the 1609 publication did
not contain real data, but data generated using the laws (which
constitutes no independent support at all…
Bad Science!).
