The music of the spheres

Kepler has finished Harmonices mundi and invites Galileo and Bacon to a table in Prague to mark it. He is delighted with his discovery that the planets' speeds can be written as musical ratios, and he cannot resist explaining it to guests who are, in different ways, sceptical.

Galileo asks for the observations that prove it and Bacon asks what use it serves, and Kepler answers both with diagrams drawn on the cloth. The argument is warm rather than bitter, and it lasts through a capon, a frumenty, and a custard tart. By the end, even Bacon concedes that a hypothesis which fits the data is worth something, though he will not concede that it is knowledge.