Word: tycho
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hours reading. The imaginary world she creates around herself is rich with the images and characters of her favorite stories--not "fantasy" tales, but ancient epics of sailors, travelers and explorers, from Odysseus and Marco Polo to Horatio Hornblower and that island-bound explorer of the sky, Tycho Brahe. The towering absence of Saskia's barely-remembered father, a Danish sailor named Thomas, fills her imagination with images of captains, the sea and Northern lands; the towering presence of her beautiful and world-wise best friend, Jane Singh, fills her dreams with images of willowy, "dusky maidens" welcoming Saskia...
Scientists, meanwhile, were demystifying the universe. Strangely, no one knows for sure who invented the telescope, but by 1609 Galileo Galilei had built one of his own. With it he was able to confirm the heretical speculations of Copernicus, Kepler and Tycho Brahe that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe. The specific origins of the microscope are equally obscure. In the 17th century, Robert Hooke used it to describe accurately the anatomy of a flea and the design of a feather; Antonie de Leeuwenhoek discovered a world of wriggling organisms in a drop of water...