Galileo was a natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the scientific method. He also made revolutionary telescopic discoveries, including the four largest moons of Jupiter.
The scientist Galileo was born 450 years ago, Galileo was born on February 15, 1564, in Pisa, Tuscany. In his middle teens, Galileo joined a monastery school near Florence, and then in 1581, he enrolled in the University of Pisa, where he was going to study medicine. However, he was more inclined towards mathematics and decided to make a profession in mathematical subject and philosophy. He investigated why the Moon travelled around the Earth, and was famous for dropping objects from the top of the leaning tower to Pisa in Italy. He dropped metal balls of different weights from the top of the tower and measured how fast they travelled. He discovered that they all travelled at the same speed.
Galileo fired lots of cannonballs from different places. He discovered that the faster the cannonball travelled, the less curved its path was. He thought that if a cannonball travels very fast, it will never land on the Earth. It will keep falling. He thought this was how the Moon orbited the Earth, but never landed on it.
His most famous invention was the telescope. Galileo made his first telescope in 1609, modeled after telescopes produced in other parts of Europe that could magnify objects three times. He created a telescope later that same year that could magnify objects twenty times. Not knowing that looking at our very own star would damage his eyesight, Galileo pointed his telescope towards the Sun. He discovered that the sun has sunspots. Craters and mountains on the Moon. The Moon's surface was not smooth and perfect as received wisdom had claimed, but rough with mountains and craters whose shadows changed with the position of the Sun. Phases of Venus. Jupiter's moons. The stars of the Milky Way. The first pendulum clock.
-
The Italian astronomer argued that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. He used experimental evidence to prove that something was true. He relied on accurate readings from instruments and did not make up or imagine the data in order to prove a theory. This approach is what we know today as the Scientific Method.
-
He has been regarded as a hero from the seventeenth century. If we talk about his discoveries, he was the first person to report telescopic observations of the mountains on the moon, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. He calculated the law of free fall, conceived by the principle of inertia; he also determined the parabolic trajectory of projectiles and promoted the relativity of motion.
-
Galileo’s significant contributions were observational data, which he obtained with a telescope he made himself. He was the first astrophysicist to scan the spaces with a light-magnifying instrument; he is also referred to as the father of observational astronomy.
-
He was died on 8 January 1642 at age 77 after suffering from a fever. He died in near Florence, Italy
You must be logged in to post a comment.