Tycho Brahe

At twenty he fought a duel with his cousin over a mathematical dispute and lost part of his nose. He wore a metal prosthesis for the rest of his life. When his remains were examined in 1901, copper traces were found around the nasal bone.

The Danish king gave him an entire island. On Hven he built Uraniborg: observatory, residence, printing house and alchemical laboratory at once. It even had a paper mill — so that he could print his own observations.

Accounts of life on the island include the following. He kept an elk; the elk drank beer and died falling down a staircase. A small man named Jepp sat beneath the dining table, and Tycho treated his remarks as prophecy.

The result was accuracy to within about one arcminute — roughly ten times better than the generation before him. The telescope would not be turned on the sky until eight years after his death. He went as far as the unaided eye can go.

His own model of the cosmos was wrong: a compromise in which the planets circle the Sun while the Sun circles a stationary Earth. But Kepler inherited his Mars observations, and from them drew the answer — not circles, ellipses.

The question that remainsIf the data of a man holding a wrong model produced the right answer — what survives in science, the claim or the record?