A Danish nobleman with a brass prosthetic nose, a supposedly clairvoyant companion, and a pet elk that died falling down stairs after drinking too much beer at a castle party. Tycho Brahe sounds like a rejected fantasy character, yet this same man broke the 2,000-year-old understanding of the universe using nothing but his naked eyes, massive metal instruments, and a terrifying obsession with precision.

This episode follows the duel over mathematics that cost him his nose, the 1572 supernova whose zero parallax shattered Aristotle's perfect heavens, and the island observatory where he hoarded the best astronomical data on Earth like a dragon. It ends with the dinner-party death that spawned centuries of murder theories, the 2010 exhumation that settled them, and the assistant named Kepler who turned Tycho's fanatical measurements into the laws of planetary motion.

• The eclipse that was a day off: how 16th-century astronomy's sloppiness created its reformer
• A drunken duel over math, a brass nose, and the legend chemistry finally corrected in 2012
• The new star of 1572: how zero parallax proved the heavens could change
• Death by etiquette: the burst bladder, the mercury rumors, and the exhumations that cleared Kepler
• The data dragon's hoard: how Tycho's measurements became Kepler's ellipses and cut errors by 80 percent