What was Galileo Galilei ?

Galileo did end his essay with reservations about his theory and hoped that future scientific research could provide further explanation on tides.

Galileo was encouraged by his father to study medicine in school, as there were more lucrative financial prospects with a medical degree than other fields of study.

Galileo enrolled at the University of Pisa, with hopes of becoming a doctor. But like many young university students, he would eventually switch majors.

Young Galileo found himself rather bored with his medical studies. After accidentally attending a geometry lecture, he quickly became taken with mathematics.

Galileo’s father eventually accepted his son’s wish to switch his course of study and major in mathematics and natural philosophy

In 1581, Galileo made a rather inquisitive observation of a swinging chandelier in a cathedral

He replicated this phenomenon on his own at home with two pendulums and realized that they could keep time. About seventy-five years later, Christiaan Huygens used these same methods to invent the pendulum clock.

In addition to his interests in astronomy, mathematics, and physics, Galileo also had an artistic eye.

He taught courses in perspective and chiaroscuro. Galileo would demonstrate his artistic abilities in the illustrations of his scientific books, most notably in his 1610 text The Starry Messenger, which included sketches of his lunar observations that were controversial for their crater-filled surface, which went against the commonly held view of a pristine and unblemished moon.

Thanks to the magnification capabilities of his telescope, Galileo discovered that our galaxy the Milky Way is comprised of many clustered stars.

efore Galileo and his telescope, the prevailing view was that the Milky Way was comprised of nebulae, as with the naked eye the close grouping of stars appear to be cloudy and hazy.

From 1595 to 1598, Galileo was hard at work designing and redesigning several forms of geometric and military compasses. These compasses helped both gunners and surveyors.

On the battlefield, the compass was able to accurately elevate cannons and effectively calculate the amount of gunpowder required for each cannonballs. For surveying land, it allowed for the construction of any shape of polygon, making measuring the area of a given parcel of land much easier.

In 1593, Galileo created a thermoscope, an instrument that demonstrates changes in temperature; think of it as a precursor to the thermometer.

Galileo was the first person to notice Saturn’s encircling rings; however, he actually didn’t know that they were rings.

When Galileo observed the planet with the rings directly aligned with Earth, he believed that two large bodies, possibly planets, surrounded Saturn. When the rings weren’t aligned to Earth, he thought the bodies had disappeared.

Galileo’s pendulum observations to make a pendulum clock, who would confirm the bodies were actually rings.

In 1612, Galileo made an observation of an unidentified object that he initially thought was a fixed star. He was unaware that he had actually observed the planet Neptune, most likely the first person ever to do so as the furthest planet in our solar system (sorry, Pluto fans) is not visible to the naked eye.

Galileo noted in his journals, corresponded with Neptune’s position in our solar system. Johann Galle and Urbain Le Verrier would officially discover Neptune more than 200 years after Galileo’s initial observation.

An often-repeated anecdote from Galileo’s life is the story of an experiment he conducted off the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It is said that Galileo dropped balls of different masses to prove that when objects dropped from the same height fall to the ground at the same speed

One of the lesser-known discoveries of Galileo is his work on sound frequency. Galileo came to realize that sound traveled in waves after conducting an experiment where he would scrape a bronze plate with a chisel at different speeds.

In honor of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first recorded observations with his telescope and the release of Johannes Kepler’s book Astronomia nova, the United Nations declared 2009 to be the International Year of Astronomy. Events throughout the year were held all over the world to promote the importance of astronomy and scientific education in general.

Galileo is buried in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, Italy. The church dates back to the 14th century and is also the final resting ground for other great Italians like Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Rossini.

Galileo is notably referenced in one of the most popular songs of all time—“Bohemian Rhapsody” by British rock band Queen.

One of Galileo’s most notable texts was The Assayer, which was published 1623. In groundbreaking work, Galileo outlines the importance of the scientific method and experiments as opposed to the prevailing concept of scholasticism, which relied on making assumptions out of observations.