Between the death of Copernicus and the birth of Galileo, Giordano Bruno was born in 1548 in Nola, Italy. Fifty-two years later, at the turn of the 17th century, he was gagged and burned at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. His books were to be “publicly destroyed and burned in the square of St. Peter,” and placed in the Index of Forbidden Books. Why? He reaffirmed the Copernican view that the Earth circles the sun. But he went much further. His heresy argued that the universe is infinite, composed of “innumerable worlds” similar to our own solar system, and that our sun is not the center of the universe. His true sin? Proposing a cosmology that removed human beings from the center of the universe.

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