Galileo Galilei
[8] Galileo studied speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion and also worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of the pendulum and "hydrostatic balances".With an improved telescope he built, he observed the stars of the Milky Way, the phases of Venus, the four largest satellites of Jupiter, Saturn's rings, lunar craters and sunspots.[15] Galileo was born in Pisa (then part of the Duchy of Florence) on 15 February 1564,[16] the first of six children of Vincenzo Galilei, a leading lutenist, composer, and music theorist, and Giulia Ammannati, the daughter of a prominent merchant, who had married two years earlier in 1562, when he was 42, and she was 24.[44] While not being the first person to observe the Moon through a telescope (English mathematician Thomas Harriot had done so four months before but only saw a "strange spottednesse"),[45] Galileo was the first to deduce the cause of the uneven waning as light occlusion from lunar mountains and craters.The Moon was not what was long thought to have been a translucent and perfect sphere, as Aristotle claimed, and hardly the first "planet", an "eternal pearl to magnificently ascend into the heavenly empyrian", as put forth by Dante.[35] On 7 January 1610, Galileo observed with his telescope what he described at the time as "three fixed stars, totally invisible[b] by their smallness", all close to Jupiter, and lying on a straight line through it.In its opening passage, Galileo and Guiducci's Discourse gratuitously insulted the Jesuit Christoph Scheiner,[106][107][108] and various uncomplimentary remarks about the professors of the Collegio Romano were scattered throughout the work.[g] Prompted by this incident, Galileo wrote a letter to Castelli in which he argued that heliocentrism was actually not contrary to biblical texts and that the Bible was an authority on faith and morals, not science.[133] In February 1616, an Inquisitorial commission declared heliocentrism to be "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture".On 26 February, Galileo was called to Bellarmine's residence and ordered "to abandon completely ... the opinion that the sun stands still at the centre of the world and the Earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.[137][138] This portrayal of Simplicio made Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appear as an advocacy book: an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defence of the Copernican theory.[156] After a period with the friendly Ascanio Piccolomini (the Archbishop of Siena), Galileo was allowed to return to his villa at Arcetri near Florence in 1634, where he spent part of his life under house arrest.[15] Dava Sobel argues that prior to Galileo's 1633 trial and judgement for heresy, Pope Urban VIII had become preoccupied with court intrigue and problems of state and began to fear persecution or threats to his own life.[15][161] The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II, wished to bury him in the main body of the Basilica of Santa Croce, next to the tombs of his father and other ancestors, and to erect a marble mausoleum in his honour.[162][163] These plans were dropped, however, after Pope Urban VIII and his nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, protested,[162][163][164] because Galileo had been condemned by the Catholic Church for "vehement suspicion of heresy".Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, a lutenist and music theorist, had performed experiments establishing perhaps the oldest known non-linear relation in physics: for a stretched string, the pitch varies as the square root of the tension.[172] These observations lay within the framework of the Pythagorean tradition of music, well known to instrument makers, which included the fact that subdividing a string by a whole number produces a harmonious scale.For sea navigation, where delicate telescopic observations were more difficult, the longitude problem eventually required the development of a practical portable marine chronometer, such as that of John Harrison.In 1586, Simon Stevin (commonly known as Stevinus) and Jan Cornets de Groot dropped lead balls from the Nieuwe Kerk in the Dutch city of Delft.[227][228] Interest in the Galileo affair was revived in the early 19th century when Protestant polemicists used it (and other events such as the Spanish Inquisition and the myth of the flat Earth) to attack Roman Catholicism.In 1939, Pope Pius XII, in his first speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, within a few months of his election to the papacy, described Galileo as being among the "most audacious heroes of research... not afraid of the stumbling blocks and the risks on the way, nor fearful of the funereal monuments"."[230] On 15 February 1990, in a speech delivered at the Sapienza University of Rome,[231][232] Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) cited some current views on the Galileo affair as forming what he called "a symptomatic case that permits us to see how deep the self-doubt of the modern age, of science and technology goes today"."[234] In March 2008, the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Nicola Cabibbo, announced a plan to honour Galileo by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls.[250] Following the success of The Assayer, Galileo published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo) in 1632.Despite taking care to adhere to the Inquisition's 1616 instructions, the claims in the book favouring Copernican theory and a non-geocentric model of the solar system led to Galileo being tried and banned from publication.Despite the publication ban, Galileo published his Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze) in 1638 in Holland, outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.[254] Galileo's books, personal papers and unedited manuscripts were then collected by Vincenzo Viviani, his former assistant and student, with the intent of preserving his old teacher's works in published form.It was a project that never materialised and in his final will, Viviani bequeathed a significant portion of the collection to the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, where there already existed an extensive library.[254] A small portion of Viviani's collection, including the manuscripts of Galileo and those of his peers Evangelista Torricelli and Benedetto Castelli, was left to his nephew, Abbot Jacopo Panzanini.Around 1750 the Florentine senator Giovanni Battista Clemente de'Nelli heard of this and purchased the books and manuscripts from the shopkeepers, and the remainder of Viviani's collection from the Panzanini brothers.
Galileo (disambiguation)Galileo Galilei (disambiguation)ArcetriUniversity of PisaAnalytical dynamicsheliocentrismkinematicsobservational astronomyAstronomyphysicsengineeringnatural philosophymathematicsUniversity of PaduaCosimo II de MediciFederico CesiFerdinando II de MediciFra Paolo SarpiFrancesco Maria del MonteOstilio Ricci da FermoBenedetto CastelliMario GuiducciVincenzo VivianiPhysical cosmologyBig BangUniverseAge of the universeChronology of the universeInflationNucleosynthesisGravitational wave (GWB)Microwave (CMB)Neutrino (CNB)Hubble's lawRedshiftExpansion of the universeFLRW metricFriedmann equationsInhomogeneous cosmologyFuture of an expanding universeUltimate fate of the universeLambda-CDM modelDark energyDark matterShape of the universeGalaxy filamentGalaxy formationLarge quasar groupReionizationStructure formationExperimentsBlack Hole Initiative (BHI)BOOMERanGCosmic Background Explorer (COBE)Dark Energy SurveyPlanck space observatorySloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey ("2dF")Wilkinson Microwave AnisotropyProbe (WMAP)AaronsonAlfvénAlpherCopernicusde SitterEhlersEinsteinFriedmannHawkingHubbleHuygensKeplerLemaîtreMatherNewtonPenrosePenziasSchmidtSuntzeffSunyaevTolmanWilsonZeldovichList of cosmologistsDiscovery of cosmic microwavebackground radiationHistory of the Big Bang theoryTimeline of cosmological theoriesastronomerphysicistpolymathDuchy of Florencescientific methodmodern sciencevelocitygravityfree fallprinciple of relativityinertiaprojectile motionapplied sciencependulumhydrostaticthermoscopemilitary compassestelescopeMilky Wayphases of Venusfour largest satellitesJupiterSaturn's ringslunar craterssunspotsmicroscopeCopernican heliocentrismCatholic ChurchRoman InquisitionDialogue Concerning the Two Chief World SystemsPope Urban VIIIJesuitsTwo New Sciencesstrength of materialsVincenzo Galileilutenistmusic theoristGiulia AmmannatiMichelangeloFlorence