He said the universe was infinite with countless worlds, and the Church burned him for it

Giordano Bruno argued the cosmos had no center, that stars were distant suns with their own planets, and some of those worlds might hold other life. After an eight-year trial on heresy charges including denial of the Trinity, the Roman Inquisition burned him alive in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600, tongue bound so he couldn't address the crowd. He's remembered as an early martyr for freethought, though historians debate how much of the verdict was cosmology versus theology.

— Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition — University of Chicago Press, 1964
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