Kim Dalton Dalton 1

Calculus

Mr. Warstler

October 29 1997

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was born near Pisa, Italy, on Feb. 15, 1564. He received his early education at the monastery of Vallombrosa near Florence, where his family had moved in 1574. In 1581 he entered the University of Pisa as a medical student but became interested in another field while in church. Supposedly, Galileo had noticed a lamp swinging in a cathedral and found that the lamp always required the same amount of time to completed its swing. Galileo changed his field of study to math, but had to leave the University because of financial difficulties.

At the age of 22, Galileo invented the hydrostatic balance. This invention allowed Galileo to secure a position as a lecturer at the University of Pisa. It was at this time that Galileo is believed to have demonstrated the speed of falling bodies from the top of the Leaning Tower.

Galileo’s father died in 1592 and Galileo had to accept financial responsibility for his family. In the same year, he accepted a position as the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua. While in Padua, Galileo invented the sector, a device for the making of mathematical measurements, and a complex water pump. He worked out a mechanical explanation of the tides based on the Copernican motions of the earth, and wrote a treatise showing that machines do not make power, but transform it.

Galileo continued his investigations of motion along inclined planes in 1602 and began to study the motion of pendulums. By 1604 he had formulated the basic law of falling bodies. Galileo informally stated the principals in Newton’s first and second laws and founded the modern scientific method.

Late in 1604 a supernova appeared, and Galileo’s became interested in the sky. This supernova led him to challenge the Aristotelian viewpoint that no changes could appear in the heavens. It was in 1609 that Galileo fist learned of the new Dutch telescope. The possibility of being able to study the stars intrigued Galileo so much that he put all his work aside to design and build telescopes of his own.

With his new telescopes, Galileo was able to see the lunar mountains, the Milky Way, and formerly unobserved "planets" revolving around Jupiter which he named "Medician Stars" in honor of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Impressed with Galileo’s work, The Grand Duke made him court mathematician at Florence, freeing him from teaching to pursue research.

By the end of 1610, Galileo become a supporter of the Copernican Heliocentric World System. This system was based on the belief that the earth rotated around the sun and directly challenged the Aristotelian belief that the Earth was the center of the universe. He met strong opposition in this belief, because the Bible was seen as supporting the opposite view of a stationary earth. Galileo argued for freedom of inquiry in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), but despite his contention that sensory evidence and mathematical proofs should not have to answer to uncertain scriptural interpretations, the Holy Office at Rome issued a decree against Copernicanism in early 1616.

In 1623, a friend of Galileo became pope, and Galileo received permission to write a book impartially discussing the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. This book became Galileo’s downfall when the Inquisition found him guilty of heresy on the grounds that in 1616 he had been commanded never to defend or to teach Copernicanism. In June 1633, Galileo was condemned to life imprisonment. His book, The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was banned, and printers were prohibited from publishing anything further by him or even to reprint his prior works. Outside Italy, however, his Dialogue was translated and studied by scholars throughout Europe. Galileo's sentence was later changed to house arrest. There Galileo continued and finished his Paduan studies on motion and on the strength of materials, published at Leiden as Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences (1638). He correctly predicted this as containing the elements of a new physics that would be carried further by his successors. Galileo died at Arcetri on Jan. 8, 1642.