Galileo Biography

Galileo full name is Galileo Galilei. Galileo was an Italian astronomer, who discovered the telescope, among other things. His discoveries were crucial in the development of modern physics and astronomy.

This article will shed the light upon Galileo Galilei Biography.

Image Will Be Uploaded Soon

Galileo Biography

Galileo engaged in practical science and technology, explaining the attributes of pendulums and "hydrostatic balances," as well as studying speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, and projectile motion. He devised the thermoscope and several military compasses, and he used the telescope to observe celestial objects scientifically. Telescopic confirmation of Venus' phases, observation of Jupiter's four greatest satellites, the study of Saturn's rings, and analysis of sunspots are among his contributions to observational astronomy.

Galileo's promotion of Copernican heliocentrism (the Earth rotating every day and circling around the sun) drew criticism from the Catholic Church and certain astronomers. In 1615, the Roman Inquisition looked into the topic and found that heliocentrism was silly, ridiculous, and heretical because it violated Holy Scripture.

Early life 

When was Galileo born?

Galileo Galilei was born on February 15, 1564, in Pisa, in the Duchy of Florence, Italy.

Galileo was the first of six children born to Vincenzo Galilei and Giulia Ammannati, a well-known musician and music theorist. Galileo began his official education in the Camaldolese monastery in Vallombrosa in 1574, when the family moved to Florence.

About Galileo Education

Galileo enrolled in the University of Pisa to study medicine in 1583. He quickly got captivated with several areas, particularly mathematics and physics, because of his enormous intelligence and ambition.

Galileo was exposed to the Aristotelian view of the world while in Pisa, which was at the time the most authoritative scientific authority and the only one sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church.

Galileo, like any other scholar of his time, initially endorsed this viewpoint and was on his way to becoming a university professor. Galileo, however, dropped out of university in 1585 before completing his degree due to financial troubles.

Career as a Professor

Galileo continued to study mathematics after graduating from university, supplementing his income with part-time teaching jobs.

During this time, he launched a two-decade study of moving things and released The Little Balance, a book that described the hydrostatic principles of weighing small items and gained him considerable notoriety. In 1589, he was hired as a professor at the University of Pisa as a result of this.

Galileo performed his famous experiments with falling items while there and wrote his manuscript Du Motu (On Motion), which differed from Aristotelian theories on motion and falling things. Galileo became arrogant about his achievement, and his vehement attacks on Aristotle caused him to be shunned by his peers. His contract with the University of Pisa expired in 1592.

Galileo promptly found a new job teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy at the University of Padua. Galileo's appointment was fortunate because his father had died in 1591, putting him in charge of his younger brother.

During his 18-year stay in Padua, he presented enthralling lectures and drew big audiences of admirers, enhancing his fame and sense of duty.

Telescope

Galileo met Marina Gamba, a Venetian woman, around 1600, and the three children he had out of wedlock were Virginia, Livia, and Vincenzo. He never married Marina, owing to financial concerns and a worry that his illegitimate offspring would jeopardize his social status.

Galileo was concerned that his daughters would never marry successfully, so he had them attend a convent when they were older. When Virginia and Livia became sisters at the San Mateo Convent in 1616, they changed their names to Maria Celeste and Sister Arcangela, respectively. Maria Celeste kept in touch with her father and supported him through letters till her death.

Galileo's ambition drove him to go even further, and in the fall of 1609, he made the fateful decision to point his telescope at the sky. Galileo watched the moon with his telescope to study the universe and discovered Venus had phases similar to the moon, indicating it circled around the sun and refuting the Aristotelian idea that the Earth was the centre of the universe.

Thermometer

Galileo built a hydrostatic balance for measuring small objects in 1604 in addition to the telescope and his numerous mathematical and scientific breakthroughs.

In the same year, he expanded his theories on motion and falling objects, as well as developing the universal law of acceleration, which all objects in the universe were required to follow. He also came out with a basic thermometer.

Galileo did not invent the basic glass-bulb thermometer known as the Galileo thermometer, but it was founded on his discovery that the density of liquids increases with temperature.

Galileo invented (or assisted in the invention of) a thermoscope that is similar to modern-day thermometers. A liquid rises and falls in a glass tube inside the thermoscope as the temperature of the liquid rises and decreases.

Career as a Scientist

• Galileo pondered becoming a priest as a young man, but at his father's insistence, he enrolled in 1580 at the University of Pisa to pursue a medical degree. The Florence lectures of Girolamo Borro and Francesco Buonamici affected him. When he was studying medicine in 1581, he spotted a swinging chandelier that moved in wider and smaller arcs as air currents flowed around it. In comparison to his heartbeat, the chandelier seemed to swing back and forth in the same length of time, no matter how far it was swinging.

•  When he got home, he put up two equal-length pendulums and swung one with a broad sweep and the other with a tiny sweep to see if they could keep time. It wasn't until over a century later, in the work of Christiaan Huygens, that the tautochrone characteristic of a swinging pendulum was employed to produce an accurate watch. Galileo had been kept away from mathematics up to this point because a physician earned more money than a mathematician.

• He was named to the chair of mathematics in Pisa in 1589. His father died in 1591, and he was left in charge of his younger brother Michelagnolo. From 1592 to 1610, he taught geometry, mechanics, and astronomy at the University of Padua. Galileo made key discoveries in both pure foundational science (such as the kinematics of motion and astronomy) and practical applied science during this time (for example, the strength of materials and pioneering the telescope). His diverse interests included the study of astrology, which was at the time a subject linked to mathematics and astronomy.

Galileo Information

Scientific Methods 

• Galileo made groundbreaking contributions to the science of motion by combining experiments and mathematics in a novel way. William Gilbert's qualitative research on magnetism and electricity was more typical of science at the time. Vincenzo Galilei, a lutenist and music theorist, had conducted experiments that established possibly the oldest known non-linear relation in physics: the pitch of a stretched string varies with the square root of the stress.

• These discoveries were made within the context of the Pythagorean musical tradition, which included the fact that dividing a string by a whole number yields a harmonious scale, which is widely known to instrument designers. As a result, music and physical science had long been linked by a small amount of mathematics, and young Galileo could witness his own father's discoveries grow on that legacy.
  
  

Astronomy 

Galileo challenged Aristotle's theory of the immutability of the skies by observing Kepler's Supernova in 1604 and concluding that it was a clump of distant stars.

Galileo discovered that the Moon's surface is not smooth in late 1609 using his refracting telescope. He discovered Jupiter's four biggest moons early the following year.

Engineering 

Galileo contributed to what is now recognized as engineering, as opposed to pure physics, in a number of ways. Galileo developed and updated a geometric and military compass for gunners and surveyors between 1595 and 1598. This was built on the work of Niccol Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte, who had previously designed instruments. It provided gunners with a new and safer technique of accurately raising cannons, as well as a way of instantly computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of various sizes and materials.

Physics 

Galileo's theoretical and experimental work on body motions, together with Kepler's and René Descartes' mainly independent work, was a forerunner of Sir Isaac Newton's classical mechanics. Galileo experimented with pendulums on various occasions. It is widely assumed (due to Vincenzo Viviani's book) that these began with him using his pulse as a timer to watch the swings of the bronze chandelier in the cathedral of Pisa.

Falling Bodies 

Galileo dropped balls of the same material but different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass, according to a biography by Galileo's disciple Vincenzo Viviani. This was in direct opposition to Aristotle's teaching that heavy items fall quicker than lighter ones in proportional proportion to their weight.

Mathematics

While Galileo's use of mathematics to experimental physics was groundbreaking, his mathematical methods were standard at the time, including dozens of examples of Fibonacci and Archimedes' inverse proportion square root method. The Eudoxian notion of proportion, as given forth in the fifth book of Euclid's Elements, was significantly used in the analysis and proofs.

Galileo Death

How did Galileo die?

Galileo died on January 8, 1642, in Arcetri, near Florence, Italy, after suffering from a fever and heart palpitations.

Galileo made a tremendous contribution to our understanding of the universe not just via his findings, but also through the methods he established and the use of mathematics to verify them. He is known as "The Father of Modern Science" for his contributions to the Scientific Revolution.

Conclusion

Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist, and engineer who was born in Pisa and was known as a polymath. Galileo has been referred to as the "Father of Modern Astronomy," "Father of Modern Physics," "Father of the Scientific Method," and "Father of Modern Science."

Galileo engaged in practical science and technology, explaining the attributes of pendulums and "hydrostatic balances," as well as studying speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, and projectile motion. He devised the thermoscope and several military compasses, and he used the telescope to observe celestial objects scientifically. Telescopic confirmation of Venus' phases, observation of Jupiter's four greatest satellites, the study of Saturn's rings, and analysis of sunspots are among his contributions to observational astronomy.