RE: Giordano Bruno
February 21, 2020 at 5:09 am
(This post was last modified: February 21, 2020 at 5:20 am by Belacqua.)
Well, let's sum up the arguments so far.
FakeMessiah, in the shout box, offered us a 79-second video as proof that Bruno was a martyr for science. Unfortunately Fake was apparently too impatient to watch the whole thing, because the narrator in the video says that Bruno was not a scientist. The person interviewed in the video, Ingrid Rowland, is a genuine scholar, and says that Copernicus "set the stage" for Bruno's system. The clip is too short to tell us what all other sources show: the system Bruno wanted us to adopt was a crazy unscientific religion.
Sungula has presented no argument, offered no evidence, and pointed to no sources. He claims he is not a troll, but does all the things that trolls do, and nothing else.
More reasonable posters have been fine with accepting that Bruno was not killed for science, though of course want us to keep in mind that the church was wrong to kill him. I think everyone's in agreement on that. It is wrong to burn people.
brewer pointed us to a very valuable resource: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Unfortunately this source doesn't say what brewer wants it to say. It nowhere claims that Bruno used "science thought" and instead is clear that while being an early adopter of the Copernican system, Bruno mostly relied on scripture and various mystical documents. Bruno acknowledged that he got the idea of a non-geocentric infinite universe peopled by aliens from a well-known Cardinal, who published this speculation and was not burned.
Bruno conducted no empirical repeatable experiments. (Unlike, say, the Oxford Calculators, a group of theologians who used mathematics and empirical tests to show that Aristotle was wrong about acceleration two hundred years before Bruno. So we know that people could do experiments in those days, and Bruno chose not to.)
So no one has offered any argument, evidence, or expert to show that Bruno was a martyr for science.
It was bad for the church to kill him. They didn't do it because of science.
FakeMessiah, in the shout box, offered us a 79-second video as proof that Bruno was a martyr for science. Unfortunately Fake was apparently too impatient to watch the whole thing, because the narrator in the video says that Bruno was not a scientist. The person interviewed in the video, Ingrid Rowland, is a genuine scholar, and says that Copernicus "set the stage" for Bruno's system. The clip is too short to tell us what all other sources show: the system Bruno wanted us to adopt was a crazy unscientific religion.
Sungula has presented no argument, offered no evidence, and pointed to no sources. He claims he is not a troll, but does all the things that trolls do, and nothing else.
More reasonable posters have been fine with accepting that Bruno was not killed for science, though of course want us to keep in mind that the church was wrong to kill him. I think everyone's in agreement on that. It is wrong to burn people.
brewer pointed us to a very valuable resource: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Unfortunately this source doesn't say what brewer wants it to say. It nowhere claims that Bruno used "science thought" and instead is clear that while being an early adopter of the Copernican system, Bruno mostly relied on scripture and various mystical documents. Bruno acknowledged that he got the idea of a non-geocentric infinite universe peopled by aliens from a well-known Cardinal, who published this speculation and was not burned.
Bruno conducted no empirical repeatable experiments. (Unlike, say, the Oxford Calculators, a group of theologians who used mathematics and empirical tests to show that Aristotle was wrong about acceleration two hundred years before Bruno. So we know that people could do experiments in those days, and Bruno chose not to.)
So no one has offered any argument, evidence, or expert to show that Bruno was a martyr for science.
It was bad for the church to kill him. They didn't do it because of science.
