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Astronomical Images : Representation of the aggregation of solar systems to fill up space

Giordano Bruno

Astronomical Images

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was an Italian Dominican friar renowned for his controversial cosmological ideas. While subscribing to the Copernican hypothesis of heliocentrism, Bruno went further to postulate that the Sun was just one star among many, each supporting its own solar system in an infinite universe composed of innumerable worlds. His <i>De innumerabilibus, immenso et infigurabili</i>, published in Frankfurt in 1591, is one of many works in which Bruno expounds his cosmological ideas. This woodcut figure was intended to visualise Bruno's conception of the cosmos. Each circle here represents an individual solar system, with a sun at the centre, and demonstrates how Bruno conceived that the innumerable worlds of the universe could fit together. Bruno also presented a remarkably similar figure showing the aggregation of atoms; this similarity of cosmological and atomic configurations reflects Bruno's belief in the doctrine of Nicolaus Cusanus of the 'coincidence of the opposites', according to which contraries, including minimal and maximal geometrical forms, coincide. Thus, the use of essentially the same image to represent the infinitesimally small and infinitely large was deemed appropriate, with the sequence of seven circles as an 'archetype' for the construction of the universe.</p>


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