November Meeting

Friday, November 7, 2014, 7:00 pm

Seagrave Memorial Observatory

Alan Powers

The Worlds of Giordano Bruno

What is NASA’s latest estimate of habitable planets in our Milky Way Galaxy alone? Kepler himself, for whom NASA’s space telescope is named, said that Galileo owed the idea of other habitable worlds to Giordano Bruno, the subject of my talk. It took four hundred years for Bruno's idea to be on the verge of proof. My powerpoint slides tour Europe where Bruno lived and lectured, in Naples, Rome, Venice, Toulouse, Paris, London, Oxford, and six German cities. NASA now enlists online help to deal with the thousands of pages of data generated by the Hubble and especially the Kepler telescope--which perhaps should be named the Bruno.

Dr. Powers is a teacher, poet and historian with interests including: Shakespeare, Giordano Bruno and the language of birds. His talk will expand our understanding of the life and influence of Bruno, who was one of the first people to come up against the Catholic Church’s teachings about the model of the solar system and the Universe.