AstroMedia: Kepler´s Transparent Secret of the World

AstroMedia: Kepler´s Glass Secret of the World

This glass cube holds the Mysterium Cosmographicum of the great astronomer Johannes Kepler. When the unknown young mathematics teacher published this world model in 1596, it made him one of the most famous astronomers in Europe from one day to the next. For he was able to explain the distances of the planetary orbits in the Copernican planetary system with the help of 5 geometric figures, the so-called Platonic solids, as well and precisely as no one before him.

This drawing of the nested Platonic solids and the intervening planetary orbits inside the cube consists of hundreds of thousands of microscopically small dots that were fused into the glass from the outside with a powerful precision laser. The lines, which are only 0.3 mm thin and stand out particularly clearly under lateral illumination, precisely reproduce the model down to its small inner structures. A historical and astronomical rarity.