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Entry: The Galileo Myth Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_galileo_myth#15766 Post contents: @Cognate, on Giordano Bruno, one of the best resources is "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" by Dame Frances Yates. If, after reading it, you believe Bruno to have been a martyr to science you have more credulity than I would expect of a CalTech Ph.D. Bruno may have been a heliocentrist, but his heliocentrism was not derived from a modern scientific viewpoint but from a desire to revive the sun-worship of the Egyptian pagans. It was his religious heterodoxy and not his science that led to his condemnation. Or maybe not. There is also the suggestion by Boissy that Bruno was the spy that Sir Francis Walsingham placed in the Fench embassy, who betrayed the Catholic plot to depose Elizabeth I and place Mary queen of Scots on the English throne. Documents exist showing that there was a mole in the embassy and much evidence points to Bruno, who though a Dominican priest attached to the French ambassador's household, was deeply unhappy in the Catholic church and in many respects philosophically at odds with it. He was enticed back into the Roman inquisition's jurisdiction, and it held him for a long time before his execution. The parallel to Dzherzhinsky's capture and interrogation of Sidney Reilly is obvious. Was it a long, long "debriefing," perhaps, of an enemy asset, with the end coming only when no more useful information could be extracted from him? Sent at: 2008 12 02