Galileo The Great

Who is Galileo the Great? Galileo Galilei was born February 15, 1564, Pisa Italy. Galileo is an Italian philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made many fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the scientific method. His idea about the law of the falling things, and the trajectories marked the beginning of the fundamental change in the study of motion.

Galileo has a book about nature it was written in the language of mathematics. That book changed the idea of natural philosophy from a verbal, account to a mathematical one in a way experiments became a noticed as a method for discovering the facts of nature. This finally lead Galileo to his idea of the telescope. The telescope changed the idea of astronomy and the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric system, but this idea of the system eventually resulted in problems against him.

Galileo is the oldest son of Vincenzo Galilei, who is a musician who made important key points to the scientific theory and to the practice of music and he also performed some experiments with Galileo in 1588 to 1589 on the topic between pitch and the tension of strings. Galileo and his family moved to Florence in the early 1570s. In his middle teens Galileo went the monastery school at Vallombrosa, close to the city of Florence, in 1581 Galileo attended the University of Pisa, where he would study medicine.Later he became more interested with the study of mathematics and decided to make the mathematical subjects and philosophy his profession His farther was against it. Galileo than would start to prepare himself to teach Aristotelian philosophy and mathematics subjects, and he even survived several lectures.

In the year 1585, Galileo left the university without a degree, and for many years he would gave private lessons in the mathematical subjects in the city of Florence and Siena. During this time he designed a new hydrostatic balance for weighing small quantities of things and wrote a short paper called La bilancetta meaning “The Little Balance”. He also studied on motion, which he studied for two decades. He applied for the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna in 1588 but it was unsuccessful.

So later that year he was asked to deliver two lectures to the Florentine Academy, a prestigious literary group. Galileo also found some theories about gravity, that brought him recognition among mathematicians and the patronage of Guidobaldo del Monte in 1545–1607. That made him nobleman and author of several important works on mechanics, which resulted him to obtain the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa in 1589. During his time teaching at University of Pisa he demonstrated, by dropping different kinds of weights from the top of the famous Leaning Tower, where he would study the speed of the fall of a heavy object. He came up with the fall of a heavy object does not have to do with its weight, as Aristotle had claimed. Sadly, his attacks on Aristotle made him hated on with many of his colleagues. His patrons, however, secured him the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua, where he taught from 1592 until 1610.

At this point, Galileo’s career took a dramatic turn. In spring of 1609 he heard that Netherlands this instrument was invented that showed things that are far as though they were nearby. After, few tries he quickly found out the secret of the invention is a three-powered spyglass from lenses for sale in spectacle makers shops. To improve this, he taught himself the art of lens grinding, and produced powerful telescopes.

In August that same year presented an eight-powered instrument to the Venetian Senate. They liked it so much that they he was rewarded with life tenure and a doubling of his salary. That made Galileo one of the highest-paid professors at the university. In December of 1609 he started studied the moon he drew the Moon’s phases as seen through the telescope, showing that the Moon’s surface is not smooth, as had been thought, but is rough and uneven.In 1610 Galileo discovered four moons revolving around Jupiter. He also found that the telescope showed a lot more stars than the visible with the naked eye could not see. This made Galileo write a book called “ The Sidereus Nuncius” Galileo has finally proved his belief, that he had held for decades but which had not been importance of his studies, that the Sun is the center of the universe and that Earth is a planet, as Copernicus had said. This would be one of the biggest key points in the scientific revolution. Galileo’s Copernicanism started to cause trouble for him.

In 1613 he wrote a letter to one of his students at University of Pisa about the problem of squaring the Copernican theory with certain biblical passages. The letter got sent to the wrong people, so Galileo had to go to Rome to defend the Copernican because it made his name look bad. Before leaving, he finished an different version of the letter to Castelli. In this letter, Galileo wrote about the problem of interpreting biblical passages with scientific discoveries but, did not actually interpret the Bible. He later found out that earth’s axis gets its orientation in space as Earth circles the Sun, not under a force of the velocity. But in order to give Simplicio his final word that that God made the universe in any he wanted, he put Pope Urban VIII’s argument in. The pope made many special points to the book and make recommendations. They found that Galileo did not treat the Copernican theory hypothetically and recommended that a case be brought against him. When Galileo turned 70 years old he kept working hard. He was in Siena he started to write a new book on the sciences of motion and strength of materials. He wrote most of his studies that had been stopped by his interest in the telescope. This book came out of Italy and published in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1638 under the title “Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences”.

After that, Galileo had become blind and spend the rest of his life with of his young students named Vincenzo Viviani. Galileo later dies on January 8, 1642. With out Galileo and his great works, we will not know many of many of our scientific methods. That is why he is Galileo the Great.