Galileo Galilei is The Father of
Modern Astronomy. His contribution to observational astronomy was immense. He was one of the greatest scientists of all
time, notable for his use of the scientific method in finding out how the
universe works. He was born in Pisa,
Italy, on February 15th 1564, the son of a musician. He was a promising, intelligent
student at the University of Pisa.
Initially he studied medicine. However, his obsession with pendulums, a need
to know how they worked and what forces caused them to swing with such regular
precision, led him away from medicine. This study led to his first major
discovery, that the period of a pendulum does not depend upon the arc of the
swing. This discovery fuelled further
study, including the development of a pendulum clock.
He studied physics and mathematics of
the Ancient Greeks, taking in Aristotle and Euclid. But he questioned
Aristotle’s approach to falling objects. Aristotle believed that the speed of
descent of a falling object increased with weight, a finding that Galileo felt
did not match reality and one that he set out to test. He set up a series of
experiments determining at what rate balls of different weight rolled down an
incline, determining the position of the balls after a set time and noting that
the rate was not related to the weight of the ball. In his text, De Motis, (On
Motion), he announced his discoveries to the world.
In 1592, Galileo became a professor
of mathematics at the University of Padua, where he made further contributions
to mathematics, correctly calculating the optimum placement of oars in galleys
by treating the oars as levers. He also designed other mechanical devices, a
fascination that he pursued throughout his life. Alongside a pump that only
required one horse to operate and shift huge volumes of water, Galileo made his
telescope, in 1609. With this, he studied the moon and discovered that Jupiter
had moons, as well as verifying the phases of Venus and observing a supernova.
With all this information, he showed that the universe was not perfect,
building upon the findings of Brahe and Kepler. He also showed that the Copernican system was
largely correct, in that the earth was merely a planet that revolved around the
sun
Galileo Galilei was one of the most
influential scientists of modern times, not just because of his use of the
telescope and quantification of gravity, his contribution to the scientific
method laid the foundations of modern science, giving direction to scientific
research and moving it away from metaphysics.
Garnered from many sources in the Internet.
Grateful thanks to all of them.
