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Giordano Bruno should also be remembered as a hero of science. He was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition in Rome because he upheld the heliocentric model and

Giordano Bruno should also be remembered as a hero of science. He was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition in Rome because he upheld the heliocentric model and cosmic pluralism, a mere 13 years before Galileo wrote this re-discovered letter. [added in response to multiple skeptic comments about Bruno's heroic role for science] The Inquisition jailed and tried him for 7 years before burning him; of course they had time to question him about religious, doctrinal issues so they could damn him without referring to any of the philosophical and scientific principles he held. Promoting the Inquisition's recorded accusations against him, and pretending that he was no friend of science, is not very... inspiring (to be polite). And if you are going to denounce him because of his interests in the magical, what is your opinion of Isaac Newton and his lasting interest in alchemy? scientific genius and admirable hero, or somehow a buffoon not worth a footnote in the epochal battle between science and religion? Bruno was a proud defender of free-thought, freedom of inquiry, and freedom of expression -- all central keys to the development of modern science. He wrote scientific works arguing for the Copernican model, published in 1584, years before Tycho Brahe for instance. He anticipated some of the arguments of Galilei on the relativity principle, as well as using the example now known as Galileo's ship. He was the first person to grasp that stars are other suns with their own planets.

erric 8y ago
He’s paid tribute to in the recent version of Cosmos.
virissimo 8y ago
It's terrible what happened to Bruno, but he was a mystic that engaged in rank speculation and did approximately zero science. It seems much more likely that he was killed for claiming that the devil won't be condemned and that Jesus was just a magician than for affirming a kind of heliocentrism. Sad story, yes. Hero of science, no.
- man-and-laptop 8y ago
  While what you're saying is strictly speaking true, Scott Alexander had a thesis on this: He noticed that the scientists of the day often ended up in trouble with the inquisition. And while, strictly speaking, it was for reasons not related to their scientific ideas, there is an insight: the sort of people who were curious about science were also curious and questioning about religion. In conclusion: - free thinkers are going to think freely - whether or not the church back then was anti-science is similar to the question of whether stop-and-search is racist today.
  - nabla9 8y ago
    Good point. The difference between science, occult, and alchemy was not as clear at it is today. Science did not necessarily have any better methodology. Many great men spent their life studying stuff that didn't lead to anything in both science and other stuff. Galileo 1632: >Among the great men who have philosophized about the action of the tides, the one who surprised me most is Kepler. He was a person of independent genius, but he became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenomena, and similar childishness.
  - emiliobumachar 8y ago
    Very good reference. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-a... "Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy." [...] "The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people."
ars 8y ago
> because he upheld the heliocentric model and cosmic pluralism Not according to wikipedia, which says he was killed for other reasons, not for his theories on the cosmos.
- ilove_banh_mi 8y ago
  There is a difference between the "evidence" invoked by the Inquisition, and the actual reasons they felt they needed to torture and murder a loud defender of free thought, free inquiry, free speech, and the Copernican model.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Why would Inquisition lie about that one and not wanted to really kill him for his religious ideas? Non scientists would be killed for those other ideas too. Inquisition had not reason to lie about free speech as they never considered it good thing or something valuable.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      These ideas were considered dangerous. The Inquisitors knew about the Streisand Effect. If they killed him for praying incorrectly they wouldn't be publicizing his physics theories. Besides authority is enhanced when it kills people for arbitrary senseless reasons.
bambax 8y ago
> Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition in Rome because he upheld the heliocentric model and cosmic pluralism Yates argued in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) that Bruno was burnt for espousing the Hermetic tradition rather than his affirmation of heliocentricity. Also, a "hero of science" is a stretch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_and_the_Hermetic_Tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_and_the_Hermeti...
josefx 8y ago
> He was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition in Rome because he upheld the heliocentric model and cosmic pluralism More than half the points raised in his trial were considering statements about Jesus, Mass, the Trinity, .... . Did he have at least proof of his scientific claims that wasn't contradicted by other scientists of the time?
- ilove_banh_mi 8y ago
  Should we rely on the Inquisition's records as reference to judge Giordano Bruno, or on his works and public discourse before he was imprisoned for 7 years then murdered? His arguments for the Copernican model were better than the ones made by Copernicus. He offered several lines of reasoning that Galileo later also resorted to -- you know, the very similar arguments for which Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition during 20 years. More importantly than all of that, Bruno relentlessly argued that thinkers should be free to inquire, reason, and speak regardless of what the Bible and Church said -- all the way to the day of his public murder.
  - josefx 8y ago
    > Should we rely on the Inquisition's records as reference to judge Giordano Bruno Internal records of an organization with little opposition and little reason to falsify them at the time? Do you have other sources that paint a different picture? The church certainly did not have a monopoly on paper. > you know, the very similar arguments for which Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition during 20 years. So arguments for which Galileo was never executed? Arguments for which Galileo was merely put under house arrest after years of disputes and insults exchanged between him an the highest offices of the church? Your example doesn't help to prove your point. > Bruno relentlessly argued that thinkers should be free to inquire, reason, and speak From which you get such things like "vaccines cause autism", there is a need for someone to keep an eye on self proclaimed "thinkers", especially the ones spouting nonsense. It doesn't help that (afaik) the Copernican model was too simple to account for various observations and could be shown to be worse than the complex models used for the geocentric model, which caused even Galileo some trouble.
bobthechef 8y ago
Calling Bruno a scientist, or saying he was killed for doing science, is quite a fantastic stretch. And where this article is concerned, the Galileo affair stretched something like 20 years and his house arrest in the papal apartments, overlooking the Vatican gardens, was largely the result of decades of political intrigue and him having accrued enemies. Sadly, these Protestant and Enlightenment myths persist to this day. Ignorance at best, bigotry and intellectual laziness at worst.
- EthanHeilman 8y ago
  Bruno was killed for freely inquiring into the nature of our universe. In a time such as it was that included religious and philosophical speculation as religious and philosophical ideas formed much of the foundation of how people understood the world. I think it is fair to view him as a hero of science however since he lived in an unscientific time it does not make sense to call him a scientist. >And where this article is concerned, the Galileo affair stretched something like 20 years and his house arrest in the papal apartments, overlooking the Vatican gardens, was largely the result of decades of political intrigue and him having accrued enemies. That Galileo's enemies were able to use his scientific views against him is not evidence that he was not persecuted for his scientific views. It is merely evidence that it is possible a more nimble or charismatic political player may have avoided such persecution.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  If the Church is feeling persecuted, it should look within itself for answers.

erric 8y ago

He’s paid tribute to in the recent version of Cosmos.

virissimo 8y ago

It's terrible what happened to Bruno, but he was a mystic that engaged in rank speculation and did approximately zero science. It seems much more likely that he was killed for claiming that the devil won't be condemned and that Jesus was just a magician than for affirming a kind of heliocentrism. Sad story, yes. Hero of science, no.

man-and-laptop 8y ago
While what you're saying is strictly speaking true, Scott Alexander had a thesis on this: He noticed that the scientists of the day often ended up in trouble with the inquisition. And while, strictly speaking, it was for reasons not related to their scientific ideas, there is an insight: the sort of people who were curious about science were also curious and questioning about religion. In conclusion: - free thinkers are going to think freely - whether or not the church back then was anti-science is similar to the question of whether stop-and-search is racist today.
- nabla9 8y ago
  Good point. The difference between science, occult, and alchemy was not as clear at it is today. Science did not necessarily have any better methodology. Many great men spent their life studying stuff that didn't lead to anything in both science and other stuff. Galileo 1632: >Among the great men who have philosophized about the action of the tides, the one who surprised me most is Kepler. He was a person of independent genius, but he became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenomena, and similar childishness.
- emiliobumachar 8y ago
  Very good reference. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-a... "Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy." [...] "The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people."

ars 8y ago

> because he upheld the heliocentric model and cosmic pluralism Not according to wikipedia, which says he was killed for other reasons, not for his theories on the cosmos.

ilove_banh_mi 8y ago
There is a difference between the "evidence" invoked by the Inquisition, and the actual reasons they felt they needed to torture and murder a loud defender of free thought, free inquiry, free speech, and the Copernican model.
- watwut 8y ago
  Why would Inquisition lie about that one and not wanted to really kill him for his religious ideas? Non scientists would be killed for those other ideas too. Inquisition had not reason to lie about free speech as they never considered it good thing or something valuable.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    These ideas were considered dangerous. The Inquisitors knew about the Streisand Effect. If they killed him for praying incorrectly they wouldn't be publicizing his physics theories. Besides authority is enhanced when it kills people for arbitrary senseless reasons.

bambax 8y ago

> Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition in Rome because he upheld the heliocentric model and cosmic pluralism Yates argued in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) that Bruno was burnt for espousing the Hermetic tradition rather than his affirmation of heliocentricity. Also, a "hero of science" is a stretch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_and_the_Hermetic_Tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_and_the_Hermeti...

josefx 8y ago

> He was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition in Rome because he upheld the heliocentric model and cosmic pluralism More than half the points raised in his trial were considering statements about Jesus, Mass, the Trinity, .... . Did he have at least proof of his scientific claims that wasn't contradicted by other scientists of the time?

ilove_banh_mi 8y ago
Should we rely on the Inquisition's records as reference to judge Giordano Bruno, or on his works and public discourse before he was imprisoned for 7 years then murdered? His arguments for the Copernican model were better than the ones made by Copernicus. He offered several lines of reasoning that Galileo later also resorted to -- you know, the very similar arguments for which Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition during 20 years. More importantly than all of that, Bruno relentlessly argued that thinkers should be free to inquire, reason, and speak regardless of what the Bible and Church said -- all the way to the day of his public murder.
- josefx 8y ago
  > Should we rely on the Inquisition's records as reference to judge Giordano Bruno Internal records of an organization with little opposition and little reason to falsify them at the time? Do you have other sources that paint a different picture? The church certainly did not have a monopoly on paper. > you know, the very similar arguments for which Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition during 20 years. So arguments for which Galileo was never executed? Arguments for which Galileo was merely put under house arrest after years of disputes and insults exchanged between him an the highest offices of the church? Your example doesn't help to prove your point. > Bruno relentlessly argued that thinkers should be free to inquire, reason, and speak From which you get such things like "vaccines cause autism", there is a need for someone to keep an eye on self proclaimed "thinkers", especially the ones spouting nonsense. It doesn't help that (afaik) the Copernican model was too simple to account for various observations and could be shown to be worse than the complex models used for the geocentric model, which caused even Galileo some trouble.

bobthechef 8y ago

Calling Bruno a scientist, or saying he was killed for doing science, is quite a fantastic stretch. And where this article is concerned, the Galileo affair stretched something like 20 years and his house arrest in the papal apartments, overlooking the Vatican gardens, was largely the result of decades of political intrigue and him having accrued enemies. Sadly, these Protestant and Enlightenment myths persist to this day. Ignorance at best, bigotry and intellectual laziness at worst.

EthanHeilman 8y ago
Bruno was killed for freely inquiring into the nature of our universe. In a time such as it was that included religious and philosophical speculation as religious and philosophical ideas formed much of the foundation of how people understood the world. I think it is fair to view him as a hero of science however since he lived in an unscientific time it does not make sense to call him a scientist. >And where this article is concerned, the Galileo affair stretched something like 20 years and his house arrest in the papal apartments, overlooking the Vatican gardens, was largely the result of decades of political intrigue and him having accrued enemies. That Galileo's enemies were able to use his scientific views against him is not evidence that he was not persecuted for his scientific views. It is merely evidence that it is possible a more nimble or charismatic political player may have avoided such persecution.
jessaustin 8y ago
If the Church is feeling persecuted, it should look within itself for answers.