In memoriam of a great free thinker,
Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in Rome 414 years ago on 17 February
1600. Bruno was a proponent of the Copernican ‘heliocentric’ model of
the solar system in which the earth and other planets orbit the sun
(whereas it was wrongly believed by the Church and other authorities of
the time that the sun and the planets orbit the earth). In his
courageous advocacy of the heliocentric model, as in many other things,
Bruno was correct and he was killed, quite simply, for speaking this
truth aloud and refusing to be silenced by the voices of orthodoxy. His
life, and his death, should serve as reminders to us that those who
think outside the box, though no longer burnt at the stake, face great
risks, persecution and vilification even today and often pay a heavy
price for speaking their truth. Yet ultimately, in the longer picture of
centuries and millennia we can see that it is precisely those
outside-the-box thinkers who allow human society and human knowledge to
advance for the benefit of us all.
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