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Giordano Bruno

On February 17th 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake after many years of defending Copernicus’s model, and proposing the idea that in our universe, each star is a Sun (just like ours) made of the same stuff. For this and other claims, he was severely persecuted most of his life, imprisoned for eight years, and finally burned alive

Source: Tyson, Neil deGrasse, host. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Season 1, Episode 1, "Standing Up in the Milky Way." Aired March 9, 2014, on Fox/National Geographic.

Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
Image by Wellcome Collection under CC BY 4.0 license

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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!