Two books published in 1543 marked a turning point, the beginning of the scientific revolution. In that year, the Flemish doctor Andreas Vesalius reported the results of his dissections of human cadavers, a practice that had been forbidden in earlier centuries. His findings contradicted fourteen centuries of received wisdom about human anatomy. In that same year, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus finally allowed publication of his radical theory that the Earth moved around the sun. He’d waited until he was near death (and died just as the book was being published) because he’d feared that the Catholic Church would be infuriated by his demotion of the world from the center of God’s creation. He was right to be scared. After Giordano Bruno proposed, among other heresies, that the universe was infinitely large with infinitely many worlds, he was tried by the Inquisition and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.
