Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno (1548 – February 17 1600), a.k.a. Bruno Nolano or Bruno the Nolan was an Italian philosopher, astronomer/astrologer, and occultist executed as a heretic, popularly regarded as a martyr to the cause of freedom of thought because his ideas went against church doctrine.

The cosmology of Bruno's time

In the second half of the 16th century, the theories of Copernicus began diffusing through Europe. Although Bruno did not wholly embrace Copernicus's preference for mathematics over speculation, he advocated the Copernican view that the earth was not the center of the universe, and extrapolated some consequences which may seem like common sense in the 21st century, but which were radical departures from the cosmology of the time.

Related Topics:
16th century - Copernicus - Earth - Universe - 21st century

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According to Bruno, Copernicus's theories contradicted the view of a celestial sphere, immutable, incorruptible, and superior to the terrestrial region. Bruno went beyond the heliocentric model to envision a universe which, like that of Plotinus in the third century A.D., or like Blaise Pascal's nearly a century after Bruno, had its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

Related Topics:
Celestial sphere - Plotinus - Third century A.D. - Blaise Pascal

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Few astronomers of Bruno's generation accepted even Copernicus's heliocentric model. Among those who did were the Germans Michael Maestlin (1550-1631), and Cristoph Rothmann and the Englishman Thomas Digges, author of A Perfit Description of the Caelestial Orbes (sic). Galileo (1564-1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) were younger, so they do not figure at this time. Bruno himself was not an astronomer, but one of the first to embrace Copernicanism as a world view, rejecting geocentrism.

Related Topics:
Astronomers - Germans - Michael Maestlin - 1550 - 1631 - Cristoph Rothmann - Englishman - Thomas Digges - A Perfit Description of the Caelestial Orbes - Galileo - 1564 - 1642 - Johannes Kepler - 1571 - 1630 - Geocentrism

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In works published between 1584 and 1591, Bruno enthusiastically supported Copernicanism. According to Aristotle and Plato, the universe was a finite sphere. Its ultimate limit was the primum mobile, whose diurnal rotation was conferred upon it by a transcendental God, not part of the universe, a motionless prime mover and first cause.

Related Topics:
1584 - 1591 - Aristotle - Plato - Finite - Sphere - Transcendental - God - Prime mover - First cause

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The fixed stars were part of this celestial sphere, all at the same fixed distance from the immobile earth at the center of the sphere. Ptolemy had numbered these at 1,022, grouped into 48 constellations. The planets were each fixed to a transparent sphere. Copernicus conserved the idea of planets fixed to solid spheres, but considered the apparent motion of the stars to be an actual motion of the earth; he also preserved the notion of an immobile center, but it was the Sun rather than the Earth. He expressed no opinion as to whether the stars were at a uniform distance on a fixed sphere or scattered through an infinite universe.

Related Topics:
Star - Ptolemy - Constellation - Planet - Sun

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