George+Week+Three

First off I would like to address the article about Bruno by John Kessler. I feel as if the article did a poor job at describing who Bruno is. It says what he did and where he preached his ideas, but does a horrible job at explaining the ideas that got Bruno into so much trouble. Kessler describes Bruno as a "martyr whose name should lead all the rest" (Kessler), but he did not say the ideas that Bruno died for. The idea of martyrdom is to spread ideas that go against the authorities in power, and I feel as if Kessler let Bruno down by not spreading the ideas that Bruno was persecuted for and instead by stating places that he had visited.

I found it very interesting that despite Galileo's contempt for Copernicus, he brought up the fact that Copernicus was "... so esteemed by the church that... [he] was called to Rome... to undertake [the calendars] reform" (Galileo). In his letter to the duke, I felt as if Galileo's arguments for why he should not be persecuted were sound and logical, but I guess the church in the 16th century did not hold the same views. Galileo said that he was not just saying that he disagreed with the philosophies of Ptolemy and Aristotle, but that he could "...[produce] many counter-arguments... that plainly confute the Ptolemaic system while admirably agreeing and confirm [his] hypothesis" (Galileo). Even though he had facts and proof to back up his claims, the church would rather ignore the true nature of the world in order to avoid contradiction. If the church did not have as much power as it did during the Middle Ages, science would have progressed much farther than it did with the church in power. Evidence and proof is the key to science, and the church cared about neither of these in the ways they explained natural phenomenon.