Some of the natural philosophers who worked and studied in Rudolph’s Prague:

• John Dee – who provided navigational direction to the infant English empire, knowledge gained perhaps while he was contacting angels, gem-gazing, and perfecting his magic shows
• Tycho Brahe – who wore a copper prosthetic nose (his was cut off in a duel) and kept a clairvoyant dwarf named Jepp under his dinner table, and a pet moose that died by falling down the stairs after drinking too much beer. Brahe died of a burst bladder because he refused (out of courtesy?) to leave the dinner table after consuming too much drink.
• Johannes Kepler – who cast horoscopes for fellow students while at university and successfully defended his mother in court on a criminal charge of witchcraft
• Judah Loew be Bezalel – Talmudic scholar and mystic who suppossedly animated the Golem, an incredibly voilent and uncontrollable mud-man created to protect the Jewish ghetto from state-sponsored pogroms.
• Jost Bürgi – the most innovative mechanical engineer of his time and an inventor of logarithms
• David Fabricius – theologian and astronomer who died after denouncing a goose-thief from the pulpit (he was hit in the head with a shovel by said goose-thief)