This year we’ve covered an Italian who affected food/candy and another with art, on to Science. If you watched the new Cosmos, you may remember Bruno’s name. He was the Dominican friar who proposed that the stars in the night sky could be suns which in turn would have their on planets. Therefore there could be life on these other planets. Now Bruno was more than just a friar, he was pretty educated so he’d be on par with a modern-day college professor. Still, what he was saying seemed pretty far out in its day, the Renaissance. I don’t think he was the first, he was probably the first to get it written down. Why do I say Bruno’s hypothesis was odd? Am I not committing some form of the chronological snobbery fallacy? Probably. The Copernican Heliocentric arguments were making the rounds then, Bruno sided with this too; I feel he was getting ahead of himself and/or diving into the realm of Science Fiction. On the other hand, things we once thought were imaginary can sometimes be true or theoretical? The multiverse, a standard trope in comic books; atoms, the silliness of Democritus who lived in a time when Greeks didn’t have even microscopes.
Back to Bruno though.
He pitched this and it ran afoul of the Catholic Church because he lived on the Italian peninsula. Seems rather harmless today but back then, saying life existed elsewhere challenged religious doctrine which I don’t think had an actual position. Somehow Bruno was challenging the existence of god or pitching pagan mindset. Then again, he also disagreed with the Church’s more defined and rigid stances about the Trinity, Christ’s divinity, Mary’s virginity and Transubstantiation. Guess which charges were put at the top of the list?
The Catholic Church didn’t imprison him right away. Bruno managed to flee and wandered various European states for 16 years teaching and researching. Plus remember, the Church’s reach wasn’t absolute on the Italian peninsula, he resided in Venice and Padua without trouble.
Alas his luck ran out with the Roman Inquisition and Venice handed him over. Bruno was put on trial for seven years, found guilty and burned at the stake. His ashes scattered into the Tiber River.
Today Bruno lives on in Astronomical circles through awards and a Moon crater. Plus the Catholic Church has a division of Astronomy which works closely with The Great Courses’ exoplanets’ host Dr. Laird Close of the University of Arizona.