Prague 7: "I don't want to die like Tycho Brahe"

Apparently - or at least according to one of the guide books that we took to Prague with us - this is the English translation of a colloquial Czech phrase meaning that one needs to visit the toilet. How true this is, I have no way of knowing. If we assume it is true, I don't know whether it is a polite expression to use or a rude one - so herewith my apologies if necessary.

Tycho Brahe (1547-1601) was a Danish astronomer. He had built an observatory on the island of Uraniburg where, for twenty years, he undertook the precise series of astronomical observations which were probably his greatest contribution to the development of astronomy at the time, and certainly the envy of Johannes Kepler. Tycho also produced a theory of the motion of the planets that was an alternative to Copernicus theory of a system with a stationary sun at the centre. Tycho's theory had a stationary Earth at the centre, with the Sun going round the earth. All the other planets known at the time - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - moved in orbits round the Sun (which was going round the earth). This theory could account for the astronomical observations of the time. [Further reading: I Bernard Cohen The Birth of a New Physics p.78 footnote.]

Tycho Brahe might have been a very precise and careful observational astronomer. But he appears to have been a spectacularly unpleasant character. He lost a part of his nose during a duel as a student, and acquired an artificial nose made of silver and gold (according to Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, made of tin according to our guide book) to fill the missing part. He eventually got completely the wrong side of the authorities in Denmark, and went into exile, along with his haughty and arrogant personality, finally finding his way to Prague. There he met and worked with Kepler, through a fraught professional relationship.

In Prague, Tycho Brahe was the Imperial Mathematicus to the Emperor Rudolph II - some sort of equivalent to an Astronomer Royal in the UK. In theory, this attracted a very handsome salary; in practice Tycho Brahe had to fight for his pay, as the Emperor's finance's weren't in a brilliant state.

Tycho Brahe is buried in the Church of Our Lady at the Tyn, just off the main town square in Prague. We were able to visit him there, though I am not sure what other visitors made of us trying to spot the artificial nose on the sculpture on his gravestone (now mounted on a pillar overlooking the grave itself).

The traditional story of Tycho Brahe's death is cited, from the original document, in Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers:

Tycho Brahe, in the company of Master Minkowitz, ahd dinner at the illustrious Rosenberg's table, and held back his water beyond the demands of courtesy. When he drank more, he felt the tension in his bladder increase, but he put politeness before his health. When he got home he was scarcely able to urinate ... After five sleepless nights, he could still only pass his water with the greatest pain, and even so the passage was impeded ... On 24th October, his delirium ceased for several hours, nature conquered and he expired peacefully.

This account has passed into folklore as a death from a ruptured bladder, and hence the reported Czech expression. The suggestion of politenss attributed to Tycho Brahe doesn't ring true with the rest of his reported behaviour. According to the web, recent studies of Tycho Brahe's hair during an exhumation suggest that he actually died of mercury poisoning. How boring ...