Historical Context of the Barometer

During the year 1600 CE, a man impri/soned in Rome by the name of Giordano Bruno was tried and found guilty of heresy by the Roman Inquisition. Pope Clement VIII deemed Bruno to be an “impenitent and pertinacious heretic” and he sentenced Bruno to be burned alive at the stake for his crimes.

Bruno was a free thinker and spoke almost as freely about those thoughts. His crime was to be in support of the Copernican heliocentrism theory of the earth orbiting the sun (Copernicus’ findings were not published until his death in 1543 avoiding inquisition). Bruno also voiced his belief that the sun was just another star moving among an infinite number of stars with planets that could be inhabited in similar fashion to the Earth. His thoughts were consistent with a pantheistic viewpoint, where God is everywhere and in everything in the universe, and he expressed those thoughts to those who would listen, as well as those who did not approve. He was a freethinker and chatty about it. He was not burned alive for thinking freely, however. Giordano Bruno was punished for teaching, writing, and sharing those thoughts freely with others. Bruno made an effort to recant, but his effort did not satisfy the pope, as Bruno could not bring himself to give up the core of his philosophy. His final days included brutality, humiliation, and disrespect intent on instilling fear into the hearts of all possible heretics. Giordano Bruno was burned to death with a gag in his mouth and one of his books tied to his ankle. Thus starts the 17th Century.

This was a dangerous time to be expressing free thought but free thought was growing out of control and the discoveries were exciting. The demands to support economic productivity, commerce, and grow...

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TEXTBOOK

Burke, James. The Day the Universe Changed. Boston: Little, Brown and, 1985. Print.

Hewitt, Paul G. Conceptual Physics. 11th ed. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2010. Print.