Bohemian rhapsody

Bohemian rhapsody

Before he became the father of modern science, Rene Descartes spent three years as a soldier. He enlisted at age 22 soon after the Thirty Years’ War began. At this time representatives of the Catholic king-elect were famously thrown out of a castle window, giving birth to what is known as Prague’s Bohemian Revolt. Though Descartes was a Catholic, he enlisted with a Protestant Prince, Maurice of Nassau, and was trained – and trained others as well – in calculating cannonball trajectories, mining, and military construction for ballistic defense and attack.

Descartes soon switched allegiances to the Catholic Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. While stationed somewhere near Neuburg on the Danube – in what today is Southern Germany – he had his famous “night of visions,” a series of three dreams on November 10th and 11th, 1619, which changed history. They may be apocryphal since Descartes’ notes about these dreams did not survive. Still, Adrien Billet, a 17th Century biographer of Descartes, preserved an account of them in his book La vie de M. Descartes. (1) (2)

According to Billet, in the last of Descartes’ three dreams, “the Spirit of Truth” appeared in the middle of the night and told him that the conquest of nature was to be achieved through measure and number. Therefore, the then 23 year-old “was bold enough to conclude that the Spirit of Truth had chosen him to use this dream to reveal the treasures of all the disciplines of learning (…).” (3)