To be, or not to be?
That’s the question!
Whether to be a circle,
that’s where it’s running.
Friends of TEDx, I call you today on such a journey
to Switzerland, to Denmark, to Rudolfinum Prague
to the Globe Theater in London
and then into the infinite universe.
I have the path I have already done
The film lasted for ten years.
I have 15 minutes today.
900 seconds.
If any of you know the name of a watchmaker,
who is the first watchmaker
was able to make the clock so accurate,
that they were able to measure seconds?
His name was Jost Bürgi.
He was born in 1552 in Switzerland
and became my lifetime companion.
How could it have happened?
I, Novozélanďan, a documentary student at FAMU,
I had to make a tuition fee.
So I traveled between Prague and Zurich.
And one day at the Neue Züricher Zeitung
an amazing article appeared:
the old collector offered Himmelsglobus Josta Bürgi
for sale, to the National Museum.
He wanted two and a half million francs.
That was about 60 or 70 million crowns at that time.
Thousand embroider, for example.
And when I learned that this Jost Bürgi
was thirty years old in Rudolfinum Prague,
so for some foolish reason I decided,
I want to shoot a movie about him.
I went back to Prague
and started working with Ester Krompbach,
who introduced me to Dr. Zdeněk Horský.
Mr. Horský was probably one of the most intelligent people,
what I’ve met in my life.
He was recently fired from the Astronomical Institute.
He worked on his book Kepler in Prague
and so we started such a cosmic dialogue.
Sometimes it sounded like this:
“Mr. Havas, do you know who Tycho Brahe is?”
I said, “Well, if I know,
that was the guy with that silver nose.
He lost his nose in a fight. “
Mr. Horský said:
“That too, but mainly it was a propagator of compromise
between the geocentric system of the planetary system according to Ptolemy
and a new, heretical system according to Kopernik. “
And basically here, when you see his system,
that is, the Brah system,
you see there are the same circles.
And that was the problem because of this system
he did not go out.
The problem was,
that at that time the circle symbolized the Divine Perfection.
It was unchangeable.
No one has ever known that the circles are somehow …
a little stretch.
That’s the key to the universe
was the ellipse Kepler had discovered.
At that time, Rudolph II. he learned,
that in Kassel in Germany
Jost Bürgi lives
and that he produced an amazing star globe.
He called him to Prague to show him the amazing machine.
The machine measured an average of 14 centimeters.
He had one hour machine.
The propeller powered the clock, on time,
there is a ring, round,
every day the slot machine saves the name of the saint,
so Rudolph knew that today is St. Valentine’s day,
between the halves was the Sun,
and most importantly,
in that gilded surface
all constellations of the northern position were engraved.
And that was important,
because it was a time,
when astrology played a big role.
And Rudolf could see the machine in the morning
and he knew exactly what constellation he had over his head,
which have his enemies over his head.
And he could decide, for example,
if today is a good day to sign a majesty or not.
How come the machine was so accurate?
Because the machine loses only 9 minutes for the whole year.
I had a watch in 1970, I will not say a mark,
they were much worse on that.
I will show you the interior of the machine now.
You see the perfect circles again.
But for some special reason
– I took a magnifying glass
and now I looked at the teeth,
because you can see that it’s a little shitty.
And why?
I took a magnifying glass,
and when I looked at those teeth,
carved into the perfect, round circles,
so I discovered that the teeth are irregular.
Bürgi, who only empirically and through mathematics
imitating the stars
or planet movement,
so he made irregularities in those circles.
And the result was this perfect automaton.
This is one of the first renaissance computers.
When I told Mr. Horský,
because there was a threat,
that some watchmaker discovered ellipses before Keppler,
I was surprised because Mr. Horský allowed,
to put this idea into that movie.
I’ll show you the scene I’ve made,
where Bürgi, played by Ivan Vyskočil the elder,
and Kepler plays Jan Kačer.
[movie preview]
Bürgi: “I’ve been producing bicycles for my hours all my life.
Perfectly rounded wheels –
the circle is an expression of knowledge, is not it?
Without perfectly round bikes
the clock mechanism would simply not work.
All my life is carving my teeth into perfectly round rounds.
They are gears.
And do you know what I found out?
The closer I get
simulation of planet motion,
the more I realize,
that’s the perfect wheels
I have to carve imperfections.
It’s like taking the divine perfection of the circle
and to destroy it.
The planets simply do not subdue the perfection of circular motion.
Only when I began to carve certain irregularities,
I imbued what is going on upstairs.
Fascinating, Kepler, it is,
that the imperfections, even though they have canceled the perfection of the circle,
have created their own new order.
Irregularities are not coincidences.
They speak their own, mathematical language. “
Kepler: “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.
This means that the motion of the planets must follow
by some new law. “
Bürgi: “As if the circle was not a circle!
If it’s possible.”
That’s how I imagined it.
I’m going back to Tycho Brah.
Likewise: I once again took a magnifying glass.
1586 this engraving was born.
And in 1980, when I looked at her,
so I am amazed because the coats of arms of his ancestors are below.
Down, blue on the left, is Guildenstern.
If you walk three coats up, Rosenkranz will appear.
I fainted.
I thought it was Hamlet!
And I called Mr. Horský,
this time Mr. Horský did not know that strangely.
He knew everything else, but not really.
I felt like I was on the doorstep of the new Shakespearean discovery.
And then I thought: when did he write Hamlet?
No 1600, 1601.
It was the time Brahe had fled to Prague
and promoted his cosmological theory.
Why is this happening in Denmark?
Well, that’s clear – he has escaped from Denmark.
And I had the feeling that Hamlet was not about Hamlet,
but that it is about cosmology, about Tycho Brah.
This thing I kept in myself for 37 years.
Two weeks ago when I was preparing for you,
so some of the men here said:
Google.
(laughter)
I wrote: Rosenkranz Guildenstern Brahe
Enter.
I fainted.
Stanford University flew during Stanford.
I stare. Article.
In 1997, seventeen years after me,
Professor Peter Usher writes an article
Astrophysicist Discovers New Scientific Meaning in Hamlet.
The astrophysicist discovers a new scientific sense in Hamlet.
There’s a lot of it.
First thing: where did Hamlet study?
He studied in Wittenberg.
Wittenberg was the main residence of Copernicus.
When Hamlet tells King Claudius:
“I would return to study at Wittenberg,”
the king says, “It would be retrograde to our will.”
In other words, he does not agree.
But that word at that time was cosmological.
Retrograde meant opposition to geocentrism.
Why is King Claudius named?
No: Claudius Ptolemaios.
He personifies Ptolemy.
Brahe is personified by Rosenkranz and Guildenstern,
And at that time Thomas Digges lived in London.
Thomas Digges was the first person to write an article,
when Shakespeare was 12 years old –
they by the way knew each other personally,
Digges and Shakespeare went to the same pub –
wrote an article where he was the first person in the history of mankind
said our Sun is the same as the fixed stars.
It was not the perfect shell where God lived.
Where nothing changed.
And basically 8 years after
the same was written by Giordano Bruno.
Giordano Bruno had the disadvantage of living in Italy,
in the land of the Inquisitor.
And in 1600 they burned him
for this claim.
There are many others, and now I’m not going into detail,
but in Hamlet, according to Peter Usher,
there are many similar proofs,
that “To be or not to be”
deals with new cosmology,
Again, we need to realize,
that top artists and thinkers
are interconnected around the world.
It was not at that time that Shakespeare was isolated in London
and someone lives there in Prague.
People knew each other.
And I’m convinced that in 1600
the news of Giordan Bruno’s death also reached Shakespeare.
And it could be one of the impulses why Hamlet wrote.
In order not to be sad,
so I still wanted to tell you,
that in 1977
he flew into the Voyager universe.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.
They carry a golden lump in it.
This box contains a pictogram on the packaging.
When it gets to ET,
he opens that package,
so he will find instructions on the pictogram.
When he puts it on his turntable,
and has to put 16,600 rpm there,
the board starts to rotate.
On the record he will hear: Chuck Berry, Johnny Be Good.
Really.
Also Mozart and Beethoven.
And there are 55 languages.
There is even one sentence in Czech.
This is already flying in the intergalactic space today.
It is the object furthest from the planet,
which man made.
And I just wanted to tell you,
that we needed to break that circle,
to understand the universe.
And finally, we’re into that universe
sent another circle.
Thank you.
(applause)
”
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