In the history of science few developments have been more important than the advent of the new heliocentric cosmology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whereas most of the ancient Greeks and ...

IN 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned alive by the Inquisition, in the Campo de' Fiori, Rome, for having advanced a heliocentric cosmology at variance with Catholic orthodoxy. It was a grim beginning to ...