Prof. Alberto A. Martinez, Department of History, UT-Austin

"Giordano Bruno, Galileo, and the Cosmology of Many Worlds"

Coffee and cookies will be served at 3:45pm in RLM 4.102

Abstract: Contrary to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos, historians of astronomy have argued that Giordano Bruno’s belief that stars are suns surrounded by planets was not a reason why the Roman Inquisition burned him alive on February 17, 1600. Surprisingly, I reached the contrary conclusion: a systematic analysis of all extant primary sources from Bruno’s trial, plus hitherto unknown sources, shows that Bruno’s cosmology of innumerable worlds was the major “heresy” that led to his execution. For Catholics, heresies were crimes against God. Thirty-two years later, Galileo published the book that led the Inquisition to condemn him to lifelong imprisonment for “vehement suspicion of heresy.” Right after the trial, one man wrote a manuscript in which he accused Galileo of believing in the heresy of many worlds, namely, Melchior Inchofer, the one Jesuit theologian who had written the most damning reports against Galileo, used by the Inquisition to condemn him.