On this day in the year 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition for confirming such blasphemous concepts as a heliocentric solar system and an infinite universe. Supposedly, the blessed fathers sealed his mouth by piercing his tongue and lips with a padlock "lest he speak his heresies unto the masses".

Galileo was tried in 1633 for the same heresy (heliocentrism), recanted, and got to live out the rest of his days under house arrest. In 1992, Pope John Paul II admitted that these trials could have been handled better.

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