Roy writes:

> >As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we learned that Copernicus and
>  >Galileo self-censored for many decades their proofs that the earth
revolved
>  >around the sun and that a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano Bruno,
>  >was burned alive in 1600 for the crime of sound science.
>
>  Pity he doesn't subscribe to this List, isn't it?
>
>  One paragraph in, and he's wrong, and it's an error that was discussed
>  and bottomed out here, not above six weeks ago....

I of course read your post on Giordano Bruno at the time you wrote it, but I
didn't respond to it, although I certainly thought that it was in error.

Let me enclose below a posting I put on another list a little while ago that
gives a history of Bruno more consistent with Robert Kennedy's account. The
section on Bruno occurs in the bottom half of the post:

=======================================

Date:         Thu, 9 Oct 2003 14:06:18 EDT
Reply-To:     [log in to unmask]
From:         Wirt Atmar <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:      OT: More cosmology
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

From today's NY Times:

=======================================

October 9, 2003
Cosmic Soccer Ball? Theory Already Takes Sharp Kicks
By DENNIS OVERBYE

In an unusual logjam of contradictory claims, a revolutionary new model of
the universe, as a soccer ball, arrives on astronomers' desks this morning at
least slightly deflated.

In a paper being published today in the journal Nature, Dr. Jeffrey Weeks, an
independent mathematician in Canton, N.Y., and his colleagues suggest, based
on analysis of maps of the Big Bang, that space is a kind of 12-sided hall of
mirrors, in which the illusion of infinity is created by looking out and
seeing multiple copies of the same stars.

If the model is correct, Dr. Weeks said, it would rule out a popular theory
of the Big Bang that asserts that our own observable universe is just a bubble
among others in a realm of vastly larger extent. "It means we can just about
see the whole universe now," Dr. Weeks said.

But other astronomers, including a group led by Dr. David Spergel of
Princeton, said a continuing analysis of the same data had probably already
ruled out
the soccer ball universe. They promised to post their results soon on the
physics Web site arXiv.org/list/astro-ph.

"Weeks and friends are making a dramatic claim, perhaps one of the biggest
science stories of the century," said Dr. Neil Cornish, a physicist at Montana
State University, "but extraordinary claims require extraordinary support."

For now, the two groups, who have been in intense communication the last few
days, disagree on whether the soccer ball universe has been refuted. What is
amazing about this debate, they all agree, is that it will actually be settled
soon, underscoring the power of modern data to resolve issues that were once
considered almost metaphysical.

"This is what got Giordano Bruno burned at the stake," said Dr. Max Tegmark,
a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "Is space infinite or not?"

In Nature, Dr. Weeks and his colleagues write: "Since antiquity, humans have
wondered whether our universe is finite or infinite. Now, after more than two
millennia of speculation, observational data might finally settle this ancient
question." The other authors are Dr. Jean-Pierre Luminet of Paris
Observatory; Dr. Alain Riazueleo of the French atomic energy center CEA, in
Saclay,
France; Dr. Roland Lehoucq of the Paris Observatory and CEA; and Dr.
Jean-Phillippe
Uzan of the University of Paris.

The evidence for and against a finite universe resides in a radio map of the
baby universe produced last February by a NASA satellite, the Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe. It shows that 400,000 years after the Big Bang,
the
event in which space and time emerged, the universe was laced with faint
waves and
ripples, which are the origin of modern galaxies and other cosmic structures.
In an infinite universe, according to theory, waves of all size should appear
in the sky, but in the Wilkinson data there was a cutoff: no waves larger
than about 60 degrees across appeared in the sky.

If the universe were a musical instrument, it would be inexplicably missing
its low notes, perhaps, some cosmologists have suggested, because it is too
small to play them. The universe is finite rather than infinite, they
speculate.
Like a violin that cannot produce deep cello notes, the universe cannot
produce waves larger than itself.

In such a universe, if you went far enough in one direction, you would find
yourself back where you started, on the other side of the universe, like a
cursor disappearing off the left side of a screen and reappearing on the
right.

One simple example of this is a torus, or a bagel shape, which is what you
get when you wrap the left and right and top and bottom sides of the screen
around so that they meet.

In the Nature paper, Dr. Weeks and his colleagues propose that
three-dimensional space has 12 sides, like a soccer ball, or more technically
a
dodecahedron. This model would fit with the cutoff of large waves observed in
the
Wilkinson satellite data. Each face is "glued" to its opposite number. (Don't
try this
at home.) A spaceship crossing one face or panel of the soccer ball would
enter the other side of the ball. After traveling 74 billion light-years it
would
find itself back where it had started.

While the lack of cosmic low notes is suggestive, cosmologists say there is a
definitive test of finite universes in the Wilkinson map. When the cosmic
radiation intersects the edges of the universe, it would make identical
circles,
like a balloon squashed in a box, on opposite sides of the sky. In the case of
a bagel, there would be two circles in the map, on opposite sides of the sky.
In the case of Dr. Weeks's dodecahedron, there would be six pairs of circles,
each about 35 degrees in diameter.

"This is a much higher bar to clear," Dr. Cornish said.

Dr. Tegmark said: "What's nice is it's so testable. It's the truth or it's
dead. The data is even out there, on the Internet. It's just a question of
sifting through it."

But so far the circles have not showed up.

Earlier this year, Dr. Tegmark and his wife and colleague Dr. Angelica
Oliveira-Costa, Dr. Mattias Zaldarriago, of Harvard, and Dr. Andrew Hamilton
of the
University of Colorado, searched the Wilkinson data for oppositely matched
circles. The results, they said, ruled out the possibility that the universe
was
shaped like a bagel, no doubt disappointing New Yorkers who would like to have
imagined a cosmic connection with their breakfast.

Dr. Tegmark said that the results also ruled out Dr. Weeks's dodecahedron.
"We ought to have seen those circles in our study," he said.

Meanwhile, a more thorough analysis of the data, looking for all possible
circles, has been undertaken by Dr. Spergel, who was part of the original
Wilkinson team, Dr. Cornish, and Dr. Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland. The study, about two-thirds complete, had already
eliminated
many simple models of so-called "small universes," including a dodecahedron
when the Nature paper hit their desks last week, Dr. Spergel said.

"No soccer ball, no doughnuts, no bagels," he said.

But Dr. Weeks said there were potential gaps in the circle search methods.
For one thing, if the dodecahedron were slightly larger, he said, the circles
would be smaller and would not show up in Dr. Spergel's search. But until all
the papers are posted on the archive or published where everybody can read
them,
these claims cannot be evaluated.

Dr. Weeks said that astronomers from both teams would join this fall to test
the circle search, using simulated data. If the models are false, they could
be ruled out as early as November, he said.

Dr. Cornish said that, although it was the scientific community that would
ultimately decide, his team was confident of its results. "I don't see any
wiggle room," he said.

But because it is such a "truly spectacular claim," he said, they are
planning in the next few days to run a special test focused on the particular
model.
The test could detect very small circles. "We can push it to where there's no
chance," Dr. Cornish said.

The prospects for the finite universe, he added, look bleak.

The stakes for cosmology, should the soccer ball or some other variety of
small universe prevail, are not small at all. A small universe, everybody
agrees,
would present severe problems for the prevailing theory of the Big Bang,
known as inflation, which posits that the cosmos underwent a burst of
hyperexpansion in its first moments.

Moreover, Dr. Weeks said, a small universe would eliminate one popular
variant of the theory known as eternal inflation, in which bubble universes
give
rise to one another endlessly in what some cosmologists call a "multiverse."

"This puts the whole universe in view," he explained. "It wouldn't rule out
other universes. There could be others. They would be totally unrelated,
without any contact between them."

=======================================

Just a minor correction to Tegmark's comments. What Giordano Bruno wrote was:

"Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve about these suns in
a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living
beings inhabit these worlds."

The logical extrapolation that Bruno made from his suppositions was the
million points of light in the night sky, which is our Heavens, are suns,
just as
our star is a sun, and that to the inhabitants of those remote planets, we are
a part of their Heaven -- and clearly our Earth is no Paradise. If so, where
then is Paradise to exist?

His refusal to recant this simple question was the reason why he was burnt at
the stake, not merely that he argued that space was infinite. William E.
Burrows wrote the following in his 1998 book, "THIS NEW OCEAN: The Story of
the
First Space Age":

"On the morning of Saturday, February 19, 1600 -- the year the
twenty-nine-year-old Kepler started to work for Brahe -- Giordano Bruno, the
eclectic Dominican friar and Italian Renaissance philosopher, was taken from
the cell in Rome's Nona Tower he had occupied for seven years, stripped
naked, gagged, tied to a stake, and paraded through the cramped streets at
the head of a hooded group of chanting inquisitors known as the Company of
Mercy and Pity. But they had neither. Bruno's tormentors told him that a
last-minute recantation for his sins would save him from eternal damnation as
a heretic. Bruno could not have expressed contrition even if he had wanted
to, since his jaw was clamped shut, a spike pierced his tongue, and another
spike stuck in his palate. There was no way the men in the hoods would allow
the man they were about to murder to tell the crowd at the Campo de' Fion in
front of the Theater of Pompeii, where the procession finally stopped, what
he had told Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Catholic Church's greatest
intellectual: "I neither ought to recant, nor will I. I have nothing to
recant, nor do I know what I should recant." Later, he sealed his fate by
showing contempt for his accusers. "In pronouncing my sentence," said Bruno,
who had taught in Paris, Oxford, and Wittenberg, "your fear is greater than
mine in hearing it." With a torch in one hand and a crucifix in the other,
one of Bruno's killers demanded repentance one last time. The condemned man
disgustedly turned his face away. The fire was lit and one of history's most
profound and original thinkers was burned alive."

Wirt Atmar

========================================

Wirt Atmar

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