Galileo Essay, Research Paper

Galileo Galilei, an Italian Scientist, was the man who discovered and created many theories that shaped the modern sciences.

Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564 to Vincenzio Galilei and was the first child in his family. His family was part of the Italian nobility, though they weren+t rich. His father was a merchant and musician, as well as a champion of advanced musical theories of the day. His family moved from Pisa to Florence, Italy in 1574. He started school that year at the local monastery of Vallombrosa. Only seven years later, in 1581, Galileo moved back to Pisa to start studies at the University of Pisa. His original field of study was in medicine. In 1583, while home in Florence on vacation, Galileo began to study mathematics and physical sciences. He discovered the law of Pendulum by watching a chandelier swing in the cathedral in Pisa. He timed it with his pulse and found that, whether it swung in a wide or a narrow arc, it always took the same number of pulses. From this, society gained it+s first constant method of keeping time.

Galileo discontinued his studies of medicine at the University of Pisa and shifted solely to mathematics and science, but in Pisa at the time there was only one notable science teacher, Francisco Buonamico. Buonamico was a Aristotelian, therefore Galileo became a disciple to him, and as shown in Galileo+s book Juvenilia he was very into Aristotelian physics and cosmology. Due to a lack of money, Galileo was forced to drop out of the University of Pisa in 1585. Soon after dropping out, Galileo became a lecturer at the Academy of Florence.

While in Florence , Galileo was successful in furthering his knowledge of mathematics and physics. He proceeded to create two theories that were circulated in writing only and made his name well respected. The first was La bilancetta (The Little Balance), which explained the principles and ideas behind balancing hydrostatically. The other was about his studies of the centers of balances of several different solids. With people respecting his work more, his reputation as a mathematician and physicist got him a teaching job at the University of Pisa in 1589. He soon began arguments, with commonly accepted science, by pointing out mistakes in the science and mathematics of that day.

To prove the common theory of gravity , Galileo dropped weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove his view of falling bodies. The law of falling bodies states, |In the absence of air the speed of a falling body depends only on the time of the fall. The speed of the body does not depend on the body’s weight.X He determined that Aristotle+s law of falling bodies was false. Aristotle’s law said that the weight of the objects directly determined how fast the object fell through the air.

Because of growing anger against him and his theories that weren+t in keeping with commonly accepted sciences, Galileo was driven out of Pisa in 1591. Also in 1591, Galileo+s father died and he had to support his mother, brothers, and sisters. He got a new job at the University of Padua, part of the Venetian Republic. His 18 years there were his |happiest of his life.X He visited Venice several times during his years as a professor at the University. In 1604 Galileo gave a lecture in Venice that a new star which appeared earlier that year was major evidence to support the new doctrine of Copernicus. He also argued that the new star went against everything the Aristotelian doctrine of the heavens said.

Galileo also wrote a letter that year that contained his findings on the law of free fall. In this letter, he stated that |the distances covered in equal times are proportional to the squares of the number of time intervals, and therefore, the distances covered in equal times are as the odd numbers beginning from one. | By natural motion, Galileo meant the body falling without resistance. The law is now written as s = 1/2(gt2), where s is distance, t is time, g is the acceleration due to gravity at sea level.

In 1606, Galileo+s book The Operations of the Geometrical and Military Compass showed the world a craftsman side of Galileo. In the book, he went overboard about his originality against statements from unimportant sources. It was craftsmanship, not theorizing, which gave Galileo a perfect stay at the University of Padua, although he later learned he was not the original creator of this idea.

In 1609, Galileo received word of a telescope that Holland+s Hans Lippershey invented to see things clearly much like glasses. Galileo decided to take his idea and build on it. He moved and changed one of the lenses to different positions, thicknesses, and size until he was able to see four satellites of Jupiter. He called his telescope a |spyglassX with which he also saw the mountains and the craters on the moon. He had developed the first magnifying telescope. His success in making a telescope magnify to a power of about 40 was due mostly to intuition and not reasoning in optic. It was also a stroke of genius that made him turn his new telescope towards the sky sometime in the fall of 1609. This was something that several other people could have done within the last two to three years with Lippershey+s telescope, although the results would have been very poor. Within a few months, Galileo gathered and recorded massive amounts of evidence about mountains on the moon, about the moons circling Jupiter, and about an incredibly large number of stars, especially in the Milky Way. On January 7, 1610 in Padua, Italy, Galileo happened to aim his newly developed spyglass at the planet Jupiter and discover previously unknown worlds. |On this seventh day of January in this present year 1610, at the first hour of dark, when I was viewing the heavenly bodies with my spyglass, Jupiter presented itself to me; and because I had prepared a very excellent instrument for myself, I perceived (as I had not

before, on account of the weakness of my previous attempts) that beside the planet there were three starlets, small indeed, but very bright…X was recorded on one particular night when he discovered three of the moons of Jupiter. Galileo was also a pioneer of his time not only in science but also in scientific notation as he documented his observations in Italian, rather than in Latin. This provided for a much better translation of his work and findings. Galileo thought he was observing simple, fixed stars, but their position created curiosity for they lay in a straight line on Jupiter, two to the east, and one to the west. The next night, |led by what, I do not know,X Galileo looked at the same stars again. To his amazement, they had shifted position to a straight line to the west side of Jupiter. He feared that astronomers had miscalculated the movement of the planet. Galileo could hardly wait for the next night, but was met with clouds in every direction. On January 10, Galileo could find only two of the stars to the east side of Jupiter. The third he assumed was behind Jupiter. Galileo realized that the planet+s movement could not be so erratic, and devised a theory that, contrary to everything he knew, the stars themselves must be moving.

On January 11, Galileo again saw only two stars, both on the east side of the planet. But the next night, a new smaller star came out from behind Jupiter where two were on the eastern and one on the western sides of the planet. Then on January 13, the fourth star, missing since January 8, reappeared so that one star was on the eastern and three on the western sides of Jupiter. Two nights later, all four stars were on the western side of the planet. Galileo realized now that the stars were actually planets that revolved around Jupiter. For the first time in history man had seen moons of a planet other than earth. These observation continued through February, and on March 12, 1610, all these observations were printed in Venice under the title of Sidereus nuncius (The Starry Messenger), another of Galileo’s books which took the world by surprise. The view of the heavens changed drastically, as did Galileo+s life. In the later part of that year, Galileo took his wife, his young son, and his two teenaged daughters to the convent of S. Matteo in Padua. Galileo then moved to Florence and a year after his move, his next book was published, Discourse on Bodies in Water, where he reported his findings of the phases of Venus. These phases were important to proving the truth of the Copernician theory and the heat of many disputes. In 1613, Galileo published his findings of sunspots. which sparked a debate with German Jesuit Christopher Scheiner of the University of Ingolstadt, whose observations of sunspots were published in 1612.

During those days and times, the common view of the heavens was that they were biblical in nature. With Galileo supporting Copernican theories about the planets, the church soon turned against the findings of Galileo. Galileo looked into theology to find the differences between the Copernican theories and those of the church. Along with other enlightened figures, Galileo produced essays in the form of letters, which are now some of the best writings of biblical theology. The letters circulated widely, and a confrontation with the Church authorities forced Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, in 1616, to give out the disciplinary action to forbid Galileo to |hold, teach and defend in any manner whatsoever, in words or in printX the Copernican doctrine of the motion of the earth.

Nevertheless, Galileo again supported the doctrine in a dialogue, The Great Systems of the Universe. Galileo spent six years, after that dialogue, to create his Dialogue concerning Two Chief World Systems. When the dialogue was finally published in 1630, news arrived to Galileo from an old friend that the current pope, who thought very highly of Galileo+s work and theories, said that censorship of the Copernican doctrine was never fully possible and therefore should never have ever been attempted. Before the Pope reversed the earlier action, he held a four day conference with Galileo. In a brief summary, the first day they talked of the perfection of the universe and the superlunary region as claimed by Aristotle. Day two was talk of the advantages of the rotation of the earth on its axis for the explanation of various celestial phenomena. The Third day was talk of the orbital motion of the earth and the sun and the parallax of stars. The Fourth day talked of the tides as proof of the earth+s motion.

The church then held a inquisition where the church decided to put Galileo in isolation because he was against everything that the church stood for. He lived under the hospitality of the archbishop of Siena for five months, and then was on his own to live with no visitors. In 1634 Father Marin Mersenne published his works from his isolation in France because he was forbidden to publish them in Italy. His work that was mostly widely published was his Two New Sciences. This book was a large comparison and contrast of the biblical theology and the Copernican doctrine. Widely accepted after being published, the doctrine was |known truthX to all but Italy.

During Galileo+s last eight years he lived in retirement in Florence. He became blind in 1637 but continued to work until his death on January 8, 1642. Galileo+s contribution to mechanics include the law of falling bodies, the fact that the path of a projectile is a parabola, the demonstration of the laws of equilibrium, and the principle of flotation. He devised a simple thermometer and inspired a pupil, Evangelista Torricelli, to invent a barometer. His great contribution to scientific thinking was the principle of inertia. Before his time everyone followed Aristotle+s theory that, when an object moved, something had to act continuously to keep it moving. Galileo countered this with the theory that, if a body is moving freely, something must happen to stop it or make it change direction.

Galileo was the mind that changed the world forever, and for that we are thankful.