Lightly touching the stone I was first taken by the feel of, well, really nothing. Just sensations of cold smoothness that make one wonder if one is actually touching something. The surface irregularities corresponding to pupils, to a grand mustache, to the division between what was supposed to be flesh and an obvious flesh forgery. Yes, his artificial nose.

The commemorative stone for Tycho Brahe was fashioned over the days just before his death from dense, reddish-brown material found near Prague and shows the great observer in life-size bas-relief. I closed my eyes as I again touched the stone, closing down my visual sense to attempt to heighten the tactile experience. Only my companion's breathing intruded, and it seemed almost to breathe life into the rigid form beneath my fingers. I could nearly imagine the ragged breaths of this ancient watcher, now entombed in Prague's Church of our Lady Before Tyn.

To see the resting place for Brahe was something of the culmination of a childhood dream. As a youngster I had read of the Dane Brahe-his observing feats, the island placement of his observatory Uraniborg, his prickly disposition, and his nose. Or lack thereof, since it was sliced from his face during a duel. But to finally be in that place, next to his interred remains, was a little dizzying.

James White and Martin Solc, astronomy professor at Prague's Charles University,
at Tycho Brahe's tomb. Photo courtesy of editor.

No, I am not a Brahe groupie, and I don't stalk Nobel laureates or Bruce Medal winners. I just get excited about things like this. So much of what we astronomers do involves things we cannot directly experience-things, in a sense, that don't seem real. We can gather photons, search for Cherenkov flashes, and soon, measure gravity trembles, but there is seldom a "laying on of hands." Not that you'd want to plunge into a star or tack using a Neptunian wind, but we're so far removed from what we study. "We have the largest laboratory one can imagine," I tell me freshman astronomy classes, "but we can't walk across it and tweak a burner." Indeed, we are motivated by ideas and observations of distant realms where we assume Superman's cape would still appear red and where matter and energy have the same handshake relationship we depend on here.

The shattering concept in Brahe's age was one of a Sun-centered cosmos, and it took us humans a number of generations to fully come to see it as correct. In our age, characterized by far greater sophistication in observing the microscopic and macroscopic regions of a universal continuum in scale, we see that most of what is in there and out there is invisible to us. Whether we are limited by quantum mechanical uncertainty or simply an inability to "see" something that really cannot be "seen," most of the Universe is inferred by influence and effect. Dark matter is still, for me, a difficult intellectual notion, but we see its effects. And ordinary matter, thankfully present to give the Universe a bit of flourish or merely to punctuate the nauseating emptiness, is now believed to prefer the quiet, expansive spaces between galaxies.

What else lurks beyond our vision, in particular, and our ability to sense, in general? Indeed, we confront the pleasant question of reality, yet on that chilly March day I thought not so much of this as of the remains of a gifted human lying underneath my feet. Being there made Tycho Brahe real to me, and as I think now, perhaps just being in the Universe should make it more real. Nah, it would be better to hoist a sail on Neptune and to feel the blow of those winds.