Cosmos and the Wonder of Creation
I was not familiar with Giordano Bruno until I watched the first episode of the remake (re-imagining?) of Cosmos last night. Bruno was a late 16th Century Dominican who experienced a vision of the universe as an infinite collection of infinite suns, each with worlds like our own orbiting those suns. He also seems to have been interested in more esoteric ideas that we would now consider to be part of New Age or occult thinking (for which he was certainly not alone among his contemporaries). I found this unsourced article suggesting that his famous scientific contemporaries, such as Galileo and Kepler, thought he was a bit of an embarrassment. Eventually he was burned at the stake for his ideas--probably his belief in an infinite, heliocentric world, though it is not entirely clear. Cosmos spent a good portion of the episode last night holding him up as an example of an expansive vision of the universe, one that has been proven to be true in due course. It made pains to point