1600

Bruno’s On the Infinite Universe and Worlds

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600)

The heliocentric view of the solar system promoted by Copernicus in 1543 was not widely accepted by his sixteenth-century peers. Although the idea that the Earth was not the center of the universe was inconsistent with the scriptures of the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Church, Copernicus, a church canon, was, ironically, never the focus of much controversy regarding his views. Others would soon inherit that controversy, however.

One of Copernicanism’s earliest and most vocal advocates was the late-sixteenth-century Italian philosopher, astronomer, and Dominican friar Giordano Bruno. Bruno appears to have been an outspoken advocate of a number of unorthodox and controversial views about science, religion, and natural philosophy. While not known for any particular observations, skills, or discoveries, Bruno eventually came to believe in a form of nongeocentrism far more extreme than Copernicus had espoused.

In his 1584 book, De l’Infinito, Universo e Mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), Bruno postulated that Earth was just one of an infinite number of inhabited planets orbiting an infinite number of stars, which are just suns like our own. To the Church, advocating such a plurality of worlds was mildly heretical; Bruno made it wholesale heresy with other brash demotions of the central tenets of Christian theology, such as the noncentrality of even God in his infinite universe. He fled persecution by the Inquisition for more than 15 years but was eventually arrested, tried, convicted, and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.

It is tempting to romanticize Bruno simply as a scientific martyr, fighting for the truth against a dogmatic regime, especially because some of his ideas about cosmology and the plurality of worlds have turned out to be right. But others before him had held views at odds with the Church, as did others of his contemporaries (most famously, Galileo), without suffering as drastic a fate. Bruno’s demise may not have been so much about his Copernicanism as it was about his confrontational style and his passion for outspoken criticism of authority and the so-called common wisdom.

Part of a bronze relief by Italian sculptor Ettore Ferrari (1845–1929) depicting the trial of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition in 1600.