As for Bruno, he was a renegade monk who dabbled in astronomy; he was not a scientist. There is much dispute about what really happened to him. As sociologist Rodney Strong puts it, he got into trouble not for his “scientific” views, but because of his “heretical theology involving the existence of an infinite number of worlds—a work based entirely on imagination and speculation.”

Only one teeny tiny problem… we now know that the number of planets is so large that no one could ever count them all… and if it turns out the multiverse is true then there really is an infinite number of worlds.