Poetry of Physics and the Physics of Poetry

Mechanics, Planetary Motion and the Modern Science Revolution 49

Time’s Children and his weapons, ages, years,

Months, days, and hours, all that host whose art

Makes even adamant and iron part

Have now secured me from his fury’s spears.

Wherefore I spread my wings upon the air

No crystal spheres I find nor other bar

But flying to the immense I cleave the skies

And while from my small globe I speed elsewhere

And through the ethereal ranges further rise

I leave behind what there is seen from far.

Translated by W.C. Greene

Bruno was a physicist, a poet and a mystic. He traveled extensively
through Europe spreading the teaching of Copernicus. Bruno’s own
pantheistic mystical speculations went way beyond the Copernican
point of view. Bruno believed that the universe was infinite in size and
eternal. He taught that each of the stars was also a sun, a center
of a solar system, which contained planets, some of which like the
Earth were inhabited by intelligent creatures. These ideas, some of
which are not even universally accepted today, were totally rejected
by Bruno’s contemporaries including the supporters of Copernicus.
Bruno’s imagination was more than his society could cope with. He so
infuriated the Church, that upon his return to Italy he was arrested by the
Inquisition and imprisoned for eight years. He steadfastly refused to
recant his point of view or confess to the error of his way. In fact he
bravely defended his position responding to his interrogators in the
following manner:

I hold the universe to be infinite, as being the effect of infinite

divine power and goodness, of which any finite world would

have been unworthy. Hence I have declared infinite worlds to

exist beside this our Earth, I hold with Pythagoras that the

Earth is a star like all the others, which are infinite, and that all

these numberless worlds are a whole in infinite space, which is

the universe. Thus there is a double sort of infinity, in size of

the universe and in number of worlds; this it is which has been

understood to disagree indirectly with the truth according to

faith.