Bruno's cosmology was a lucky guess, even if it was correct.
By itself, that means nothing.
But his death was deliberate, planned, and directly a result of a policy that was set in place to discourage questioning and speculation with intimidation and coercion. That's what I got out of it, not that Bruno was a genius, but that his enemies were indeed evil, and most important, why and how they were evil.
To put it another way, modern science may disagree with the creationist message and the theist world view, but it doesn't feel any need to exterminate them violently..