Badass Amateur Scientist of the Day - Tycho Brahe

If you met a guy in the 16th century who was a Danish nobleman with a metal prosthetic nose (after loosing part of the real appendage in a duel over mathematics), he kept a psychic midget named Jepp under the dinner table, and an elk that died because it consumed too much beer and fell down the stairs... you might think, this is a pretty interesting guy. Alas, he was also the father of modern day astronomy and spent 20 years of his life developing the most accurate and comprehensive dataset of astronomical observations of the age. That dataset continued on after his death to allow Keppler to calculate his three laws of planetary motion, an accomplishment that may have been stained in the blood of Keppler's ruthless mentor.

Now, why does Brahe qualify as an amateur scientist? It is my contention that the professional scientist did not come about until after the Industrial Revolution, and many of the earlier scientists were merely rich people who were looking to understand the universe and find a way to turn lead into gold. What Brahe did was important and revolutionary for the time, but really it was something that anyone could have done if they owned 1% of the wealth in Denmark and his very own island and a castle.

His measurements were all done using a set of naked eye observations using very large instruments of his own design. The key to his success was systematic, rigorous observations of the sky every night. This allowed him to discover a supernova, a new star in the sky - and his measurements were good enough to verify that it was not a planet or other nearby object. He also did lots of other cool things like perform the first survey using the triangulation method - in his case it was of his island where his research compound was located.

The myth of his death was that his bladder burst because he refused to leave the table during a dinner party. But, because he was such an interesting person, his body has been exhumed, not once, but twice in order to determine a cause of death. High levels of mercury were found in his hair tissue collected in his first exhumation. New samples have recently been collected and will be tested for metals and poisons. One hypothes is that that he was poisened by his assistant Johannes Keppler, whom Tycho would not share the results of his work while alive. Keppler is also a badass for maybe having murdered his boss in order to develop his three laws of planetary motion. (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AE31T20101115)

With the death of scientists like Tycho Brahe the world was left with a huge vacuum of personality and the dinner parties have forever since been a little bit less interesting. It is difficult to imagine a more colorful scientific historical figure. If you want to learn more about Tycho Brahe's accomplishments, including his nuclear battles with Space Hitler, you can go to his island museum, the Island of Ven just off the coast of Landskrona, Sweden, or you can visit www.tychobrahe.com.

All my information came from Wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe) , especially the part about Tycho Brahe's battles with Space Hitler.