model began to gain popularity because technology progressed enough to gain more evidence in its favor. Aristarchus developed a form of the heliocentric model in approximately 200 B.C. Other ancient civilizations, including Muslim scholars in the 11th century and European scholars in Medieval Europe, built on Aristarchus’ work.
Copernicus began making his “Little Commentary” available to his friends in 1514. This manuscript described his heliocentric hypothesis based on seven general principles stating that: “Celestial bodies do not all revolve around a single point; the center of Earth is the center of the lunar sphere—the orbit of the moon around Earth; all the spheres rotate around the Sun, which is near the center of the Universe; the distance between Earth and the Sun is an insignificant fraction
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His wild ideas soon attracted the attention of the Inquisition and to avoid prosecution in 1576 he fled from Italy and traveled through Europe, writing and teaching. Invited to Venice to tutor to a prospective patron he was denounced to the Inquisition and sent to Rome in 1592, put on trial, imprisoned and interrogated intermittently for eight years. Unwilling to change his mind, he was convicted of heresy and in 1600 burned at the stake in the Piazza Campo di Fiore in Rome. Among his writings, was an assertion that “the stars were an infinity of suns like our own, each circled by worlds inhabited by intelligent beings like ourselves.” This is an amazing conclusion since Bruno was not an astronomer and seemed to have limited knowledge about this topic. Further, his works “On the Infinite Universe and Worlds” and “On Shadows of Ideas" have been inspired by his own pantheism, rather that the ideas of Copernicus; the Copernican revolution was not declared heretical until 16 years after Bruno’s death in 17th February,