Galileo Galilei - Inventions, Facts, Quotes

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Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath, from the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence. Galileo’s championing of Copernican heliocentrism (Earth rotating daily and revolving around the sun) was faced with opposition from within the Catholic Church and from some astronomers.The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which summarized that heliocentrism was foolish, absurd, and heretical since it contradicted Holy Scripture. Galileo defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which provoked to attack Pope Urban VIII. It resulted and alienated both the Pope and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point. He was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, and forced to recant.

Galileo has been recognized as the “father” of observational astronomy, modern physics, the scientific method, and modern science. Galileo worked speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion. He worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of pendulums and “hydrostatic balances”. He invented the thermoscope and various military compasses. He with the assistance of the telescope for scientific observations of celestial objects. His contributions to observational astronomy include telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, observation of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, observation of Saturn’s rings, and analysis of lunar craters and sunspots.

He spent the rest of his life under house arrest

Galileo Galilei – Insights

Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath, from the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence. Galileo worked speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion. He worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of pendulums and “hydrostatic balances”. He invented the thermoscope and various military compasses. He with the assistance of the telescope for scientific observations of celestial objects.

Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath, from the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence
Galileo has been recognized as the “father” of observational astronomy, modern physics, the scientific method, and modern science.
Galileo worked speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion
He worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of pendulums and “hydrostatic balances”. He invented the thermoscope and various military compasses
He with the assistance of the telescope for scientific observations of celestial objects
His contributions to observational astronomy include telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, observation of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, observation of Saturn’s rings, and analysis of lunar craters and sunspots.
Galileo’s championing of Copernican heliocentrism (Earth rotating daily and revolving around the sun) was faced with opposition from within the Catholic Church and from some astronomers
The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which summarized that heliocentrism was foolish, absurd, and heretical since it contradicted Holy Scripture
Galileo defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which provoked to attack Pope Urban VIII
It resulted and alienated both the Pope and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point
He was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, and forced to recant
He spent the rest of his life under house arrest
During this time, he wrote Two New Sciences (1638), primarily concerning kinematics and the strength of materials, summarizing work he had done around forty years earlier

Galileo Galilei – Inventions

Earth’s Orbit

The telescope was discovered in the Netherlands, Galileo fashioned his own from makeshift spectacle lenses
He learned to make increasingly powerful telescopes, which he eventually used to to monitor the solar phases of the planet Venus
After noticing Venus went through similar phases to the moon, he summarized the sun must be the central point of the solar system, not the Earth as was previously assumed.

The Principle of the Pendulum

Galileo was in a grand cathedral and noticed that a lamp swinging overhead took exactly the same period of time for each swing, even as the distance of a swing got progressively shorter
The principle of the pendulum made Galileo famous, and was eventually used to regulate clocks
The law states that a pendulum will always take the same amount of time to finish a swing because there is always the same amount of kinetic energy in the pendulum — it is merely transferred from one direction to the other.

The Law of Falling Bodies

The law states that all objects will fall at an equal rate, when accounting for relatively minor differences in aerodynamics and weather conditions
Galileo showed this theory by climbing to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropping items of various weight off the side
All items hit the ground at the same time. Contrary to the conventional wisdom established by Aristotle, the speed of a heavy object’s fall was found to not be proportional to its weight.

Astrological Inventions

Galileo made several astronomical inventions that people today simply accept as common sense.
He discovered that the surface of the moon is rough and uneven as opposed to smooth as people had thought, and in 1610 he discovered four moons revolving around Jupiter
More important than either of these was his finding that many more stars exist than are visible to the eye, an assertion that came as a shocking surprise to the scientific community at the time.

Mathematical Paradigm of Natural Law

For centuries, natural philosophy, which at that time encapsulated such fields as physics and astronomy, was discussed and theorized from a qualitative standpoint
Galileo didn’t just discover specific laws of the universe, he reformed the qualitative standpoint and established mathematics as the language of scientific discovery
He pioneered the scientific method and ushered in the modern practice of experimentation and calculated laws of nature
His doing so led to the revelations that many of the laws of Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were incorrect.

Galileo Galilei – Facts

Galileo Galilei’s first name echoes his last name.

Galileo Galilei’s given name is a virtual carbon copy of his family name
In her book Galileo’s Daughter, Dava Sobel explains that in Galileo’s native Tuscany, it was customary to give the first-born son a Christian name based on the family name (in this case, Galilei)
Over the years, the first name won out, and we’ve come to remember the scientist simply as “Galileo.”

Galileo Galilei and leaning tower of Pisa Experiment

With its convenient “tilt,” the famous tower in Pisa, where Galileo spent the early part of his career, would have been the perfect place to test his theories of motion, and of falling bodies in particular
Did Galileo drop objects of different weights, to see which would strike the ground first?
Unfortunately, we have only one written account of Galileo performing such an experiment, written many years later. Historians suspect that if Galileo took part in such a grand spectacle, there would be more documentation

Galileo taught his students how to cast horoscopes.

It’s awkward to think of the father of modern science mucking about with astrology
But we should keep two things in mind:
- First, as historians remind us, it’s problematic to judge past events by today’s standards.
- In Galileo’s time, astrology was only just beginning to disentangle from astronomy.
Besides, Galileo wasn’t rich: A professor who could teach astrological methods would be in greater demand than one who couldn’t.

Galileo didn’t like being told what to do.

Based on his eventual kerfuffle with the Roman Catholic Church, even as a young professor at the University of Pisa, Galileo had a reputation for rocking the boat
The university’s rules demanded that he wear his formal robes at all times. He refused—he thought it was pretentious and considered the bulky gown a nuisance. So the university docked his pay.

Galileo Galilei didn’t invent the telescope.

We’re not sure who did, although a Dutch spectacle-maker named Hans Lipperhey often gets the credit (he applied for a patent in the fall of 1608)
Within a year, Galileo Galilei obtained one of these Dutch instruments and quickly improved the design. Soon, he had a telescope that could magnify 20 or even 30 times
As historian of science Owen Gingerich put it, Galileo managed “to turn a popular carnival toy into a scientific instrument.”

A king leaned on Galileo to name planets after him.

Galileo rose to fame in 1610 after discovering, among other things, that the planet Jupiter is accompanied by four little moons, never previously observed (and invisible without telescopic aid)
Galileo dubbed them the “Medicean stars” after his patron, Cosimo II of the Medici family, who ruled over Tuscany
The news spread quickly; soon the king of France was asking Galileo if he might discover some more worlds and name them after him.

Galileo and the church issue.

In fact, the Vatican was keen on acquiring astronomical knowledge, because such data was important for working out the dates of Easter and other holidays
In 1611, when Galileo visited Rome to show off his telescope to the Jesuit astronomers there, he was welcomed with open arms. The future Pope Urban VIII had one of Galileo’s essays read to him over dinner and even wrote a poem in praise of the scientist
It was only later, when a few disgruntled conservative professors began to speak out against Galileo, that things started to go downhill
It got even worse in 1616, when the Vatican officially denounced the heliocentric (sun-centered) system described by Copernicus, which all of Galileo’s observations seemed to support
The problem wasn’t Copernicanism. More vexing was the notion of a moving Earth, which seemed to contradict certain verses in the Bible.

Galileo probably could have earned a living as an artist.

Galileo as a scientist, but his interests—and talents—straddled several disciplines
Galileo could draw and paint as well as many of his countrymen and was a master of perspective—a skill that no doubt helped him interpret the sights revealed by his telescope
His drawings of the moon are particularly striking. As the art professor Samuel Edgerton has put it, Galileo’s work shows “the deft brushstrokes of a practiced watercolorist”; his images have “an attractive, soft, and luminescent quality.” Edgerton writes of Galileo’s “almost impressionistic technique” more than 250 years before Impressionism developed.

Galileo wrote about relativity long before Einstein.

He didn’t write about exactly the same sort of relativity that Einstein did. But Galileo understood very clearly that motion is relative—that is, that your perception of motion has to do with your own movement as well as that of the object you’re looking at
In fact, if you were locked inside a windowless cabin on a ship, you’d have no way of knowing if the ship was motionless, or moving at a steady speed. More than 250 years later, these ideas would be fodder for the mind of the young Einstein.

Galileo never married, but that doesn’t mean he was alone.

Galileo was very close with a beautiful woman from Venice named Marina Gamba; together, they had two daughters and a son.
And yet, they never married, nor even shared a home.

Galileo Galilei – Quotes

“Curiosity is the key to problem solving.”
“Two truths cannot contradict one another.”
“Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.”
“Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written.”
“…and the Earth, turning upon itself, moves round the Sun.”
“You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself.”
“I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.”
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
“He who does not know the truth is only a fool. But he who knows it and calls it a lie is a criminal.”

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