Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei, Italian philosopher, physicist and astronomer, was born in Pisa on February 15, 1564 and died January 8, 1642.

Galileo, though not the first person to use a telescope to observe the sky, did more than anyone to popularize the device and can be fairly called the father of modern astronomy.

• A devout Catholic, his writings on the Copernican
  • devout catholic like... he was going every sunday to church? This is absolutely ridiculous

• (incorporating a heliocentric, or sun-centered solar system) model of the universe disturbed the church.
  • Why was he "disturbing" the church? (No capital "c" here, hmm). Because of the literally interpretation
  • 'of the Bible where in the Old Testament (Joshua 10:1-14, where Joshua asked the sun to stop so he could
  • 'keep on fighting against the Amorites to defend the Gibeonites''

• ''Despite his continued insistence that his work in the area was purely theoretical?,
  • Does any Ph.D. or someone know what theoretical? means? Anyway he never said or wrote such a gibberish thing, sorry

• and despite his close friendship with Maffeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII),
  • I personally wouldn't be friend with someone representing a system that burned Giordano Bruno in 1600. This is absolutely false?, maybe Galileo was diplomatic? with him, but not friendly? at all.

• who presided throughout the ordeal,
  • ditto

he was forced to recant and put under life-long house arrest.

• The Church,
  • ' Here we are talking about the Catholic Church, not the Calvinism Church, the Luteran Church
  • or Osama Bin Laden's Church? Please specify, thnx

• and most everyone else,
  • like... who else for example? The idiots?

• held to a Ptolemaic, or Aristotelian view,
  • it's one view AND the other. Aristotle is remembered because he said that things
  • with different weights fall on earth with different speeds: it's the famous [Pisa Tower Experiment]?

incorporating an Earth-centered theory of the universe.

• Recent scholarship
  • Recent... when? Please state year, university, intellectual, web site
  • or idiotic as****e that said such a thing

has highlighted the fact that many of Galileo's problems with the Inquisition

• stemmed more from his lack of judgment
  • I think people that keep deleting my changes, lack of culture on this website.
  • Instead of deleting after 5 minutes i made the correction, please search the web first
  • or ask ur mama to take you to the central library

• than from any great desire by the Catholic Church to suppress his ideas.
  • Infact the Catholic Church has rehabilitated Galileo in 1992 after more than 350 years

• Nevertheless, Galileo remains a classic case of a scholar forced to recant
• some of his best work because it offended powerful forces in society.
  • This is going to happen to me in this website. Well I hope to be rehabilitated before 350 years this time

He discovered the four largest satellites of Jupiter, and he was the first westerner to observe sunspots (there is an indication that chinese astronomers had already observed them).

His experimental work in dynamics paved the way for Isaac Newton's laws of motion, and he is often credited with being one of the first scientists to fully exploit the [experimental method]? and to insist on a mathematical description of the laws of nature. His study of balls rolling down inclined planes convinced him that falling objects are accelerated independent of their mass, and that objects retain their velocity unless a force acts on them.

Many of Galileo's theories exist today only in his notes and drawings. He created sketches of imaginary devices such as a candle and mirror combination to reflect light through an entire home, an automatic tomato picker, a pocket comb that doubled as an eating utensil, and what appeared to be a crude form of ballpoint pen.

Bertolt Brecht's drama Galileo is not primarily about Galileo, but about the duties of scientists and the nature of totalitarian thought.

/Talk