GP 25 Web Book

Day 1
A Tale Told by an Idiot

A tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing

Macbeth, Act V. Scene V.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
The Oxford Shakespeare,  1914

Roman Holiday.  Yes, a lot more complicated.  We flashback to February 19, 1600.  The populace awakes early for the festivities.  The show will be well worth the wait in the cold. There will be some warmth at the end.  The heretic is no ordinary Lutheran. The audience gathers around a large pile of dry wood.  The show goes as planned.  A frail nude middle aged man arrives already on the spit.  Chanting monks bring solemnity.  The tormented man refuses to recant.  The fire ignites.  As his last defiant act, the victim shoves away a crucifix.  Blasphemy!  All have faith that the flames have consumed the heresy.  They could have not been more wrong.

No sixteenth century figure continues to incite such visceral responses.  On one hand, Bruno is a father of modern science.  A crater on the Moon is named after him.  On the other, he is a religious fanatic and mystic who ignorantly forayed into science.  He gets only passing mention in the Oxford Companion to Science.  A Nova documentary refers to him as a charlatan. He has been in no way forgiven by the Catholic Church. Just who was Giordano Bruno? What did he profess? What merited his fate?

Wanderings. 1576. A young man slips out of the Dominican monastery of San Domenico in Naples.  He had joined the Order thirsting for knowledge.  That thirst finally had gotten the former star pupil in deep trouble.  He makes it to Rome where he finds out he will be indicted.  Discarding his robes, an insignificant civilian slips north into a sea of religious turmoil.  Well educated but not yet world-wise, he teaches in order to eat.  From time to time he reverts to monastic habit.  He becomes an advocate of Copernican theory, believing that the Earth is one of several planets orbiting the Sun.

1583. A man of letters disembarks on a quay in Elizabethan London.  He enjoys semiofficial status by staying with the French ambassador.  London is a hub of enlightenment, an oasis of prosperity from the misery of religious wars on the continent.  Practical men realize that tolerance is good for business as long as one does not try to overthrow the state.  To boot, Bruno is from Italy, the seat of the rebirth of the arts and sciences.  In England, he has his most immediate and lasting influence.  He publishes his salient scientific work, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, in Italian with a fictitious Venetian publisher in 1584.  A work in the language of culture may sell.  The Puritans will not read anything in the language of decadence and in any case their censors will not waste time looking for a foreign printer.

1585. Bruno’s patron is in financial trouble.  Bruno returns to France and continues his wanderings through northern Europe.  In 1591, he accepts an invitation from a Venetian nobleman, Mocenigo, to teach memory and invention.  Venice seems safe, a stop on his early travels.  Venice is an independent city-state not under the Roman Inquisition.  His notoriety has brought him some measure of safety.  He has scored a hat trick of excommunications, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Catholic, but not Anglican.  Yet he has been allowed to recant and move on.

Disastrously for Bruno, his Italian patron wants to be taught the black arts, real magic.  To make sure that Bruno does not leave and give his supernatural powers to others, Mocenigo threatens him with the Inquisition.  Bruno is trapped.  He has no real magic to teach.

Scientific teachings.  Giordano Bruno’s main interest was philosophy and religion, not science.  He was prone to errors when discussing the Copernican theory.  He often could not keep his arguments straight.  Yet, the scientists of the day clearly got the essence of his message whether they were intrigued by it (like William Gilbert of England) or detested it (like Johannes Kepler of Prague.)  This is a far better test of lasting contributions than whether moderns find his works easy to read.  Bruno raised the key issues facing modern astrobiology.  In modern terms:

• The Sun is a star.  The Earth and the other planets orbit it.  The Sun and the other stars shine by their own light. Planets shine by reflected light.  The other stars are quite distant. One cannot see planets around them because their faint light is lost in the glare of their stars.   (This is the center of modern astronomy. Equipment to see the faint light from extrasolar planets now exists.)
• The universe is infinite with the Sun located in no special place.  There is an infinity of stars, each with planets.  (The number of stars is certainly vast, but the structure of the universe is complex.  There are hundreds of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars.  The jury is still out on whether space is infinite and on the fraction of stars with planets.)
• Time is infinite.  (The age of the observable part of the universe is vast, but finite 10 to 15 billion years.  The best estimate is 13.7 billion years.)
• In general, the same physical laws apply everywhere and there is no special center of the universe.  The heavens do change with time; change is just hard to see. "All the stars," says Bruno, "have motion, even those 'fixed' stars of which our sun is one. Nor are the comets in anywise different from other planets but for their apparent difference of position. Whereby their light is sometimes as though exposed to us in a slanting mirror." (Bruno remained a mystic, but he prodded the unification of astronomy with science.  The analogy to the mirror for comets is clever but wrong.)
• There is relativity in observing.  By comparing the mountain he was on with a distant mountain, Bruno noted the nearby mountain would look like the distance one if he switched positions.  That is, the Moon would look like the Earth if one was on the Moon and the Earth would then look like the Moon. (The astronauts had no trouble figuring out they were on the Moon, yet the essence of the point is correct.  Bruno could not have imagined the power of relativity in the hands of Albert Einstein.)
• Bruno used the Earth as a model.  There is intelligent life everywhere, both on the surfaces of planets and stars.  (No one expects to find anything alive in the scorching heat of stars.  There is no other intelligent life in our solar system.  The key astrobiological question of how common life is elsewhere remains unanswered.)
• Geometry is largely a waste of time.  Mathematics are not much help in understanding the universe.  (Bruno knew enough geometry to recognize that planets are not easily seen around distant stars.  He sensed that the self-imposed limitations of medieval and Greek mathematics had put science in a straightjacket.  He would be dumbfounded by modern mathematical physics.)
• The Earth is a living, animate object.  (This seems like a metaphor to us, but Bruno meant it literally. The Gaia hypothesis of Lynn Margolis (b. 1938) and James Lovelock (b. 1919) has some aspects of the Earth as an animate object where global ecology is a consortium for the benefit of all.)

Signifying nothing.  Bruno did a lot to anger the Church.  His complex views are hard to pigeonhole.  In modern terms, he was a Pantheist, someone who associates god with the forces of nature, and an Animist, one who places animate spirits in normally inanimate objects.  He attracted no following on these issues.  He had little interest in the issues dividing Protestants and Catholics.

Why was Bruno important enough to attract the interest of the Cardinals of the Inquisition of Rome?  As in Stalinist Russia, one had to be important to merit a show trial.  Ignorant peasants and simple town folk could be slaughtered in great numbers, like the Huguenots on the St. Bartholomew’s night in 1572.  Nut cases could be locked up or quietly terminated. Bruno, however, was well known.  The Church was sending a message to all of Europe.

The exact charges against Bruno are lost but they probably centered around his Pantheism and his rejection of Christian rites.  The manifest danger to the Church centered on his many habitable worlds and the insignificance of mankind and its home the Earth.  One need merely read Galileo and see that he dared not even discuss whether the Sun is a star.  The Inquisitors could not linger on this point without promulgating it.  The Cardinals failed to recognize the link between Copernicus, who believed in a limited Sun-centered cosmos, to the idea of a multitude of worlds around a multitude of stars. Copernicus (1473-1543) had only revived the thoughts of the Greek astronomer Aristarchus (310-230 BC).  Also, Copernican theory had just proved quite useful in reforming the calendar; its methods of calculation were not to be jettisoned lightly.

Real politics came into play. Spain and the Church had a mortal enemy in Queen Elizabeth, to whom Bruno had dedicated several books. The Spanish Armada had just been destroyed by Elizabeth (and bad weather combined with poor planning), succeeding only in introducing a few half-drowned Spanish surnames into Ireland. Spain pushed for Bruno’s execution.

Update.  Italian republicans erected a statue to Giordano Bruno in the Campo De’ Fiori in Rome to mark the end of the Pope’s secular power over much of Italy.  The Catholic Church is alive and well, but its cozy medieval cosmos is long gone.  The Church now opposes all forms of capital punishment. Jesuits have distinguished themselves in science, including astronomy and seismology. The Vatican observatory commands a distinguished reputation.

Bruno is a patron martyr for free thought.  Deists (who believe in an impersonal god, often only of the first cause), agnostics (who do not know whether god exists and typically believe it is impossible to find out), and atheists (who believe no god exists) all use the insignificance of the Earth as a prime argument.  Thomas Paine (1737-1809), the Deist American revolutionary, took the existence of a vast number of inhabited planets as given. “The person who is irreverently called the Son of God, and sometimes God Himself, would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life.” Age of Reason, 1774.

There has been no shortage of religious wars and religious prosecution from the time of Bruno to the present.  Heresy, apostasy, and blasphemy carry the death penalty for a significant fraction of the world’s population.  The treatment of peasants by Deists of the French Revolution in the Vendée and by the Atheists Stalin, Mao, and the Khymer Rouge would make proud any fanatic of the Wars of the Reformation.  Agnostics have authored no major atrocities.  It is hard to get militant about a philosophy that admits ignorance.

Notes.  A good source for Bruno’s life is the book Giordano Bruno His life and Thought by Dorothea Waley Singer (Greenwood Press, New York, 1968).  It includes a translation of On the Infinite Universe and Worlds: http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/bruno03.htm

For a contrary view of Bruno’s importance to science see The Folly of Bruno by Richard W. Pogge: http://www.setileague.org/editor/brunoalt.htm

The Catholic Encyclopedia gives the Church’s current view of Bruno: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03016a.htm

Shakespeare presented Hamlet shortly after Bruno's death. The play contains far more allusions to Copernican theory than can be explained by chance. Finding allusions in Shakepeare to Bruno is a cottage industry. You can get a myriad of hits on the web but none are certain. Shakespeare had an acute spectator interest in science. The book Shakespeare and science; a study of Shakespeare's interest in, and literary and dramatic use of, natural phenomena; with an account of the astronomy, astrology, and alchemy of his day, and his attitude towards these sciences by Cumberland Clark in 1929 has been reprinted and is available from dot com book sellers. The Irish author James Joyce (1882-1941), like Shakespeare, was an avid spectator of science. He featured Bruno, Hamlet, and astronomy in his novels. Physicists honored his interest with the name "quark" for a class of subatomic partciles.

Copyright Notice

back to top