The Astronomer Who Heard the Planets Sing

In 1619, Johannes Kepler published a book with a remarkable claim: the planets were singing. The German astronomer had spent years charting the orbits of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, calculating their velocities with painstaking precision. What he discovered astonished him. Each planet's changing speed as it traced its elliptical path corresponded to musical intervals — Saturn humming in low, slow tones, Jupiter holding a steady bass, Earth oscillating between the notes mi and fa, what Kepler called the sound of misery and famine, the twin realities of our fallen world.…