Background on Bruno

Abstract

I should like to raise two points about Giordano Bruno's martyrdom (Random Samples, “Burned by history,” 10 Mar., p. 1743). In 1600, Bruno, a Dominican friar, was declared a heretic by the Inquisition and burned at the stake, an event the Catholic Church has now said was a “sad episode.” Although Bruno is endeared to scientists for having “embraced Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system” and having “declared that Earth might be only one of an infinite number of worlds inhabited by beings entirely foreign to humans,” in fact he went much further than most scientists today might find endearing. He found it easy to accept the Copernican view that Earth moved around the sun because he thought Earth itself was alive and so, of course, it could move. And he taught not only that the infinite worlds were inhabited, but that they too were alive. For Bruno, the entire universe was alive. The stars consisted of living worlds prowling through space like Blake's Tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night.