GREAT INVENTORS
DECEMBER 25, 2021
Galileo Galilei : Life Of The Genius
Galileo Galilei : Life Of The Genius. A brief tale from a man that revolutionized the science to its modern form with his brilliant ideas.
Galileo Galilei was an Italian natural philosopher, astronomer and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences and the development of the scientific method. He made pioneering observations of nature with long-lasting implications for the study of physics and is considered the father of modern science.
He also supported the Copernican theory (heliocentrism) and constructed a telescope. Copernicus states that the Sun is at the center and the Earth revolves around it while rotating on its axis daily.
Galileo was born on February 15, 1564 near Pisa, Italy. He was the first of six children and grew up with his siblings during the Italian Renaissance. His father was Vincenzo Galilei, a famous musician and a music teacher and his mother was Giulia Ammannati. In 1574, he moved to Florence with his family and began his education at the Camaldolese monastery.
During the summer of 1581, he initially began to study medicine at the University of Pisa at age 16 but later changed to philosophy and mathematics. In 1585 he gave up his study in medicine and left without completing his degree.
Unlike Copernicus who faced no persecution when he was alive because he died shortly after publishing his book, Galileo’s discoveries were met opposition within the Catholic Church when he published his book and in 1616 the inquisition declared heliocentrism to be “formally heretical”.
In 1609 Galileo built his first telescope, which was an improved version of a Dutch design after he heard about the invention of the telescopes in Holland. The improved telescope let him observed and described the moons of Jupiter in January 1610, the rings of Saturn, the phase of Venus, sunspots along with the craters and mountains on lunar surface. His telescope design revolutionized astronomy and pushed the scientific method to its modern form.
Galileo was the chairman of mathematics at the university of Pisa and the Padua from 1589 to 1610. During those years Galileo prove that gravitational acceleration is not dependent on weight. He did that by dropping two balls with different weight from the top of Pisa tower. The experiment surprised Galileo. He found that the heavy ball hit the ground first, but only by a little bit. Except for a small difference caused by air resistance, both balls reached nearly the same speed.
Galileo discovered through this experiment that the objects fell with the same acceleration, proving his prediction true and disproving Aristotle’s theory of gravity.
This resulted in Galileo’s law of falling bodies : in the absence of air resistance, all bodies fall with the same acceleration, independent of their mass.
Galileo also helped prove that the Earth revolved around the Sun. He had intense communication with a number of leading scientists including Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer and mathematician. Kepler’s work became the foundations for later discoveries of Isaac Newton and others.
At Padua, Galileo had a long-term relationship with a woman named Maria Gamba but they never married. Their first child, Virginia, was born in 1600. followed by a second daughter, Livia in the following year. Their son, Vincenzo was born in 1606.
Galileo died on January 8, 1642 at age 77 in Arcteri near Florence, Italy after suffering from heart palpitations and a fever. The effect of his discoveries after his death is enormous to modern science including the ability for us today to observe the rotation of planets and confirm Copernican views of the solar system.
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