Every few days, Giordano Bruno has his revenge. Bruno, Galileo’s predecessor, was burned alive at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600. The stars in the heavens are so numerous, he observed, that our sun must be one of many. Surely these other stars, too, are orbited by a multitude of planets, some of which may even be inhabited by other beings.
Every few days, Giordano Bruno has his revenge.
Bruno, Galileo’s predecessor, was burned alive at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600. The stars in the heavens are so numerous, he observed, that our sun must be one of many. Surely these other stars, too, are orbited by a multitude of planets, some of which may even be inhabited by other beings.
The church imprisoned him for seven years without trial, then stripped him naked, paraded him through the streets of Rome, tied his tongue with a leather strap, and lashed him to a wooden pillar. He was given one last chance to recant, but he refused to take back his ideas.
To squelch his legacy, the church placed all his texts on the Index of Forbidden Books. Unlike Galileo’s works, Bruno’s were banned until 1966. Galileo merely claimed that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe. Bruno suggested that the universe had no center at all. He was one of the first in history to posit that the universe might be infinite, in which case the Earth would be just another pebble in the sky. The church could no longer claim to be the center of the universe, because it had none.
In 1584, Bruno summed up his philosophy, writing, “This space we declare to be infinite…in it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.” Now, more than four hundred years later, roughly four thousand extrasolar planets in the Milky Way have been documented, and the list grows almost daily. (In 2017, NASA listed 4,496 candidate planets, of which 2,330 have been confirmed, discovered by the Kepler spacecraft.)
