But they encouraged the Chinese to adopt the tools of Tycho Brahe and other famous astronomers in the West.

FORBES: The Best Book of 2011: Why Science Emerged in the West

The lunar crater named after Tycho Brahe, a 16th century Danish astronomer, near the moon's south pole, is 85km across.

ECONOMIST: Asteroid impacts

When a star goes supernova, it leaves a remnant, like the one Tycho Brahe observed in 1572, or Johannes Kepler in 1604.

FORBES: When A Supernova ... Fizzles

In the early 17th century, Johannes Kepler worked out the laws of planetary motion as a result of years of analysis of the observations made by Tycho Brahe.

ECONOMIST: Mining the digital skies

Fox tackles the origins of the current thinking on the beginning of the universe starting way, way back with Plato, and moving her way through Ptolemy, the astronomical duo of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler (did you know that Brahe had his own castle for studying astronomy?), Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and the current state of the Big Bang, String Theory, and alternative theories for the origins of the universe.

FORBES: The Weekly E-Book Reading List