But neither does he deserve to be reduced to a cartoon about intellectual freedom. None of this means that Bruno in any way deserved his fate. One example He fled France because of a violent dispute about the proper use of a compass (seriously). He engaged in bitter academic disputes, many of which had nothing to do with his cosmic framework. A major reason he moved around so much is that he was argumentative, sarcastic, and drawn to controversy. Nor was Bruno the simple, humble figure shown on TV. The gaunt, lonely fellow you see on screen in Cosmos is not the real Bruno. In 1583 he visited England, lived with the ambassador to France, and met regularly with the Court…and so on. In 1581, King Henry III of France offered him a lucrative lectureship at the Sorbonne. In 1579, he was appointed a professor of philosophy in Tolouse, France.
#Cosmos a spacetime odyssey carl sagan series#
In reality, he had a series of powerful patrons.
It was a philosophical corollary of his heterodox belief that God and souls filled all of the universe.ĭespite his heresies, Bruno was neither impoverished nor alone. You could fairly call Bruno a martyr to the cause of religious freedom, but his cosmic worldview was neither a deduction nor a guess. The others involved denying the divinity of Jesus, denying the virgin birth, denying transubstantiation, practicing magic, and believing that animals and objects (including the Earth) possessed souls. His belief in the plurality of worlds was just one. The Roman Inquisition listed eight charges against Bruno. He was advancing his own, heretical theology, which goes a long way to understanding the real reason that he was burned at the stake. In Cosmos, Tyson does carefully say that Bruno was not a scientist, and instead describes that picture of infinite worlds as a “guess.” But Bruno was not guessing. He performed great feats of memory (using an early form of mnemonics), he was accomplished in mathematics but also in magic, and he was a true theological and philosophical innovator in his vision of endless inhabited worlds. His interests were theological, not physical, and his astronomical writings are considered amateurish and confused. (Credit: Camille Flammarion)īruno also was not much of a Copernican, or by most accounts much of an astronomer at all. This woodcut, adapted in the first episode of Cosmos to depict Bruno, originated in a 19th-century popular science text. Nicolas kept his infinite theology within the Catholic framework, however, and suffered no ill consequences for his views.Ī mystic reaches toward the infinite. That idea actually originated with Nicolas of Cusa, a German philosopher who lived a century earlier (and who wrote about the notion of infinite space even before Copernicus, though not in a detailed astronomical way).
For starters, Bruno was not the first to link the idea of infinite space with the infinite glory of God. That depiction in the new Cosmos matches the standard textbook story of Bruno, but it is misleading and in some ways downright wrong. It’s a powerful, tragic, and cautionary tale, right? Eventually Bruno was imprisoned by the Church, and burned at the stake in 1600–10 years before Galileo announced his first observations that confirmed Copernicus was right. He grew impoverished and largely friendless, but refused to recant. His belief in an infinite universe, reflecting the infinite glory of God, got Bruno shunned and exiled from country after country. As Tyson intones in Cosmos, “for one man, Copernicus didn’t go far enough.” Starting in the late 1500s, Bruno argued not only in favor of Copernicus’s sun-centered cosmology, he also proposed that space was infinite in extent that stars were other suns, surrounded by other Earths and that those other worlds were also populated. Here is where Cosmos 2.0 runs into its big problem, missing out both on a chance to set history straight and to embrace the generous, forward-looking spirit of Sagan.īruno is well known as a martyr to the cause of modern astronomy. The other is an extended tribute to the 16th-century Italian philosopher and theologian Giordano Bruno. One is a tribute to Carl Sagan, a moving segment in which host Neil DeGrasse Tyson recalls his teenage encounter with the revered astronomer. In overall content, the new series introduces two major innovations. All of these things were unknown 34 years ago. The updated Cosmos discusses free-floating planets between the stars, shows real images of Uranus and Neptune, and gives a precise age to the universe (that would be 13.8 billion years). Special effects have advanced greatly since Carl Sagan’s 1980 original the new visualizations are both more dramatic and more realistic. Giordano Bruno: cosmologist, genius, heretic, martyr, jerk.