The discovery published in 1596 by Johannes Kepler regarding the orbits of the planets and the Platonic solids.
From physicist Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics, regarding Kepler’s discovery:
‘The cube is a perfect kind of solid, for each side is the same as every other side, and each edge is the same length as all the other edges. Such solids are called Platonic solids. How many are there? Exactly five: besides the cube, there is the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron. It didn't take Kepler long to make an amazing discovery. Embed the orbit of Earth in a sphere. Fit a dodecahedron around the sphere. Put a sphere over that. The orbit of Mars fits on that sphere. Put the tetrahedron around that sphere, and another sphere around the tetrahedron. Jupiter fits on that sphere. Around Jupiter’s orbit is the cube, with Saturn beyond. Inside Earth's orbit, Kepler placed the icosahedron, about which Venus orbited, and with Venus's orbit was the octahedron, for Mercury.'
Kepler based his model on circular orbits centered on the Sun – perfectly circular orbits were - to Kepler - a religious certainty at the time due to the flawlessness of God's plan. He thought that he had discovered a geometric blueprint for the entire Universe designed by this commonly accepted 'Creator-God.' After he had discovered this incredible relationship between the planetary orbits and the Platonic solids, published in his 1596 Mysterium Cosmographicum, he continued to work towards more and more precise measurements that would make the discovery all the more credible.
What he discovered . . . that the orbits of the planets were, in fact, ellipses, as well as the fact that the centers of their almost circular orbits were not centered precisely on the Sun . . . only served to undermine his discovery – at least to the scientifically inclined mind obsessed with a certain understanding of precision and accuracy. In this process he discovered three very precise laws of planetary motion – the discoveries that made him famous.
In fact, the orbits of the planets are not precisely circular . . . but extremely close – most whose eccentricity is within thousandths of being a perfect circle. Still, as incredible and ‘inexplainable’ as these phenomena are, science moved on because it could make no falsifiable predictions based upon the information. In 1609, Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter and they did not conform to Kepler's theory based upon the Platonic solids. Science completely ignores the phenomena because it is unable to explain it within its own reality. Still, Kepler’s discovery remains.
Science to this day dismisses his Platonic solids/orbit theory . . . only because the orbits are eccentric by thousandths from the ideal circle. According to NASA, the eccentricities of the nine major planets and the Moon from a perfect circle are:
Mercury: 0.206
Venus: 0.007
Earth: 0.017
Moon: 0.055
Mars: 0.094
Jupiter: 0.049
Saturn: 0.052
Uranus: 0.047
Neptune: 0.010
Pluto: 0.244
One can forgive Mercury for flying so close to the Sun, and Pluto for flying so far. What is left, thousandths of a percentage point from the ideal, is that if the orbits were perfect circles (which they almost are), the five Platonic Solids (not one or two or three) are all nested within the orbits as Kepler discovered.
There is nothing in physics or in fact all of science - no 'law' - that explains this phenomenon. Nor could this be explained by any stretch of chance or accident. It is also not necessary for life or the evolution of life. Something else is happening here.
Note that the eccentricities listed are current . . . Neptune’s current eccentricity is 0.0113, but from 1800 to 2050 its mean eccentricity is 0.00859. This is to say that we have no way of knowing what the original shapes of the orbits of the planets were at their creation. NASA’s data shows that the spheres that correspond to the relative sizes of each of the six interior planets’ paths around the Sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), vary from the ideal circle on an average of .07o8 (92.92% accuracy) . . . and without Mercury this percentage of accuracy increases to .0438 (95.62% accuracy).
At that time, 1609, science was new and everything discovered scientifically about the solar system was new. Our solar system and the visible stars beyond were the known Universe at the time. Kepler saw the orbits of the planets expressing pure Platonic geometry as God's hand touching the Universe.
The observed Universe obeys, or reflects, the established laws of physics - yet none of the order witnessed here is witnessed there.
Nowhere out there is found the geometric perfection witnessed
within our solar system.
Not even close.
It's hard for us to imagine the influence the Church had in the daily life of Kepler’s world. The reality of the Sun-centered solar system threatened the Church’s Earth-centered belief.
Kepler, a devote Lutheran, saw all this as a pure expression and proof of the Creator-God so common to so many organized religious beliefs. In his Mysterium Cosmographicaum he makes this clear:
'God himself was too kind to remain idle, and began to play the game of signatures, signing his likeness into the world; therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of geometry.'
The expression of this geometrical precision in this solar system is, in fact, an intentional 'signature,' or more importantly, a message whose authorship is clearly of a vastly higher order than our own – from a 'God that was too kind to remain idle.' Kepler was right. He understood the phenomena through the lens of his own belief in the Creator-God, separate and above, and upon the belief that our solar system was the entire Universe, and understandably thought that what he observed within the solar system is universal . . . it's not . . . making his discovery all that more extraordinary.
There is nothing close to the geometric precision witnessed . . . here . . . anywhere in the observed Universe except . . . here.
Neither the purely scientific or religious view is adequate - this needs to be seen through the lens of the much more expanded view:
The Evolution of
Consciousness
.