426 years ago today, February 17th, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was 🔥burned at the stake🔥 at Campo de' Fiori, a central square in Rome.
Bruno was an Italian philosopher, astronomer, and former Dominican friar known for his revolutionary cosmological theories, including the concept of an infinite universe and the possibility of other inhabited worlds.
Bruno's genius was enabled by his robust memory and his mnemonic techniques. His scholastic excellence earned him audiences with many prominent figures including courtiers, a national ambassador, a national secretary of state, King Henry III of France, Queen Elizabeth I of England, and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.
He challenged Catholic and Aristotelian doctrines, advocating for pantheism and the Copernicus heliocentric model. Due to his radical beliefs and refusal to recant, he was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition. He was arrested in 1592 and was imprisoned for 7 years before his eventual execution.
In the 19th century, Bruno's image was restored as an icon of free thought and a martyr for science.
As Bitcoiners, we have cause to equate consensus with truth, and while that equation might hold true on the Bitcoin ledger, TRUTH DOES NOT PROCEED UPON CONSENSUS in the human domain. If that were the case, the Earth would have been flat 600 years ago, and then, when everyone decided that the Earth was spheroidal, all of a sudden the Earth would have become spheroidal.
When we study the histories of various subjects, in particular science, we are studying the moments in time in which one person was right and everyone else was wrong. Oftentimes, these geniuses who were ahead of their time were treated very poorly by their masses of peers and only after they were dead did their work gain the appreciation it always deserved.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642): Defended the Copernican heliocentric system (Earth revolves around the Sun) against the geocentric model approved by the Church. He was tried for heresy, forced to recant, and spent his final years under house arrest.
Eunice Foote (1819–1888): Demonstrated that carbon dioxide and water vapor trap heat, predicting the greenhouse effect and climate change in 1856, years before John Tyndall, but her work was largely ignored because she was a woman.
Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906): Defended statistical mechanics and the existence of atoms at a time when many top physicists dismissed them.
Alfred Wegener (1880–1930): Proposed the theory of continental drift (plate tectonics), which was laughed at by the scientific community for decades until it was validated long after his death.
Georges Lemaître (1894–1966): Proposed what became known as the Big Bang Theory, which was initially dismissed by major scientists in favor of a "steady state" universe, but later confirmed.
Ida Noddack (1896–1978): Predicted an element (masurium/technetium) and, most significantly, suggested in 1934 that bombarding heavy nuclei with neutrons could lead to "smaller nuclei," essentially predicting nuclear fission before it was proven, only to have her work ignored.
Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865): Discovered that handwashing by doctors could drastically reduce fatal infection rates in maternity wards. He was ridiculed, dismissed, and eventually died in an insane asylum, but his "germ theory" was later vindicated.
John Snow (1813–1858): Identified that cholera was spread through water, not "miasma" (bad air), which was rejected at the time.
Gregor Mendel (1822–1884): Laid the groundwork for genetics through pea plant experiments, but his work was completely ignored during his lifetime, only being recognized 16 years after his death.
Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929): Commented on the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI: "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years." He was correct, as WWII began exactly twenty years later.
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943): Often treated as a "crazy" inventor compared to Edison, he predicted wireless technology, mobile phones, and the internet ("the world will be converted into a huge brain") in the early 1900s.
Winston Churchill (1874–1965): Warned about the rise of Nazi Germany when most of the British government was pursuing appeasement.
Alan Turing (1912–1954): Persecuted for his homosexuality in the 1950s and forced to undergo chemical castration, despite being a war hero who broke Nazi codes and founded computer science.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968): Fought against racism and for equality, frequently opposing the status quo of his time, and was assassinated for his beliefs.
There are proverbial game changers active today who have inherited the burden of the Cassandra complex. Cassandra was a Trojan princess, sister of Hector and Parris, whose premonitions of the fall of Troy at the hands of Agamemnon, Achilles, and the Greek forces, went unheeded by her father. The frustration of being right when seemingly no one will listen to you is something that many Bitcoiners have experienced and understand.
Many paradigm shifting thinkers suffer in life as a result of the closed-mindedness, prejudices, and ignorance of the masses. Despite this, they persist in their work knowing that TRUTH DOES NOT PROCEED UPON CONSENSUS and that society grows great when old people plant trees underneath whose shade they shall never sit.
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