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Bruno, then, was a complex figure, and his contributions to science are questionable. He was more belligerent free-thinker than proto-scientist, and whilst there is no shame in that, the intellectual origins of our ascent into insignificance lie elsewhere. Bruno was a brash, if portentous, messenger who would likely not have reached his heretical conclusions about an infinite and eternal universe without the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, grounded in what can now clearly be recognised as one of the earliest examples of modern science, and published over half a century before Bruno’s cinematic demise.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in the Polish city of Torun in 1473 and benefited from a superb education after being enrolled at the University of Cracow at 18 by his influential uncle, the Bishop of Warmia. In 1496, intending to follow in the footsteps of his uncle, Copernicus moved to Bologna to study canon law, where he lodged with an astronomy professor, Domenica Maria de Novara, who had a reputation for questioning the classical works of the ancient Greeks and in particular their widely accepted cosmology.

The classical view of the universe was based on Aristotle’s not unreasonable assertion that the Earth is at the centre of all things, and that everything moves around it. This feels right because we don’t perceive ourselves to be in motion and the Sun, Moon, planets and stars appear to sweep across the sky around us. However, a little careful observation reveals that the situation is in fact more complicated than this. In particular, the planets perform little loops in the sky at certain times of year, reversing their track across the background stars before continuing along their paths through the constellations of the zodiac. This observational fact, which is known as retrograde motion, occurs because we are viewing the planets from a moving vantage point – the Earth – in orbit around the Sun.

This is by far the simplest explanation for the evidence, although it is possible to construct a system capable of predicting the position of the planets months or years ahead and maintain Earth’s unique stationary position at the centre of all things. Such an Earth-centred model was developed by Ptolemy in the second century and published in his most famous work, Almagest. The details are extremely complicated, and aren’t worth describing in detail here because the central idea is totally wrong and we won’t learn anything. The sheer contrived complexity of an Earth-centred description of planetary motions can be seen in Ptolemy’s Model, which shows the apparent motions of the planets against the stars as viewed from Earth. This tangled Ptolemaic system of Earth-centred circular motions, replete with the arcane terminology of epicycles, deferents and equant, was used successfully by astrologers for thousands of years to predict where the planets would be against the constellations of the zodiac – presumably allowing them to write their horoscopes and mislead the gullible citizens of the ancient world. And if all you care about are the predictions themselves, and your philosophical prejudice and common-sense feeling of stillness require the Earth to be at the centre, then everything is fine. And so it remained until Copernicus became sufficiently offended by the sheer ugliness of the Ptolemaic model to do something about it.