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It sounds fantastical enough to have been created by Terry Pratchett or J.K. Rowling, but the Conjuring Arts Research Center is very much real, and one of the world's greatest collections of books dedicated to the deceptive arts.
Conjuring Arts may be hard to find, but it is located in the heart of New York's magic community. A few blocks northeast is Tannen's, the oldest operating magic shop in the city, and a few blocks to the west is Fantasma, a magic store home to the largest Houdini museum in the world. One of the people on the Center's Board of Directors is Brooklyn-born magician David Blaine.
The not-for-profit organization was established in 2003, "dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of magic and its allied arts." It was started by William Kalush, who developed a love of magic from the card tricks shown to him by his father, a Marine wounded in World War II. This love of card magic turned to a love of collecting magic books, which now form a wondrous collection of over 15,000 books—some dating to over 600 years old—housed in this hidden location.
[...] But these magic books aren't just secreted away. Above all, the Conjuring Arts Research Center was set up to be a practical resource. "I wanted a place that was available for anyone with an appointment, to be able to come in and find some of the rarest material," says Kalush. A large part of the organization's work is sourcing these forgotten treasures, preserving them, and making them available to magicians and scholars.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 10 2017, @05:47PM
I haven't seen the original Cosmos in many years, but this is rather inaccurate. It implies that Kepler abandoned "mysticism" when he discovered ellipses fit the data better. But that's simply not true. If anything, mysticism of a sort inspired him to broaden his search for "heavenly harmony," and he found ways to model the elliptical orbits within his old mystical framework, particularly using musical and harmonic proportions to match up with orbital characteristics of each planet. Prior to Kepler, the "harmony of the spheres" was largely an abstract philosophical metaphor -- but Kepler sought to show the musical proportions directly in the heavens [wikipedia.org]. And even in his final works, Kepler viewed his mathematical "laws" as merely that: a mathematical model. But the true order, so he'd repeat over and over, resided in the musical proportions that he claimed he had found (even if they were really only an approximate fit, from a modern science perspective).
Circular orbits were considered the norm, and it was hard for other scientists of the time to abandon them. Galileo for example, despite reading of Kepler's empirical data, refused to accept elliptical orbits -- arguing in favor of the Copernican circular orbits that still required lots of epicycles. For Galileo, though, it wasn't really "mysticism" of perfect circles: it was an idea that was attached to the alternative physics of celestial matter that had been promoted since Aristotle (and likely before). Celestial matter wasn't supposed to operate on the same principles as terrestrial matter (e.g., which tended to come to "rest"). The planets used circles because they were supposedly set in motion at the beginning of time and would travel forever that way. Proposing that they are ellipses requires an explanation about WHY they deviate from a more "perfect" motion, despite being composed of celestial matter. That explanation (at least a rigorous one) really wouldn't come along until Newton's theory of universal gravitation, which itself was modeled on "mystical" unseen forces associated with alchemy and such.
Since Kepler didn't yet understand the law of inertia and how it could ultimately create a unified theory of terrestrial and celestial matter, Kepler was required to find an alternative justification for his elliptical system, which he mostly found in a theory of musical proportions as applied to the planets (along with some other speculative geometry), something that seems rather bizarre and "mystical" to modern scientists.