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What is Galileo famous for?

• Saying that the earth and all planets revolve around the sun. For this, he was called a heretic by the church and locked up.
• Dropping things off the top of the tower of Pisa to test the theory of terminal velocity.
• Building the first high-powered telescope to look at the stars

“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe”

- Galileo 

The Italian astronomer Galileo is undoubtedly one of the greatest figures in science. NowYouKnowAbout Scientists brings your children Galileo’s life story in DVD format as part of an easy introduction to great historical figures including Newton, Pasteur, Darwin and Marie Curie

Galileo was born in the Italian town of Pisa in 1564. His father was a respected music teacher and an educated man but, although comfortable, they were not well-to-do. As the home filled up with ever more children, Galileo was sent off to the local Benedictine monastery which was the best place to get an education in Latin and logic. Soon Galileo wanted to become a monk but his father insisted he studied medicine instead at the University of Pisa. By nature he was anti-authoritarian, a free thinker and a free spirit. He was argumentative and difficult to discipline as a student. It was here that he tested the terminal velocity theory by dropping things off the top of the tower of Pisa to see if big heavy things fell faster than light smalls. He also developed an idea for a pendulum clock after watching a lamp swinging rhythmically during mass in church. It soon became clear that Galileo preferred maths as a subject and at 21 he left Pisa and earned money giving private lessons in maths in Florence and Siena. He went back to Pisa University as a maths teacher but was still fairly disruptive and unruly.

However in 1591 at the age of 27, Galileo became head of the family when his father died and this forced him to take responsibility for supporting his widowed mother and his siblings. At the same time, he had developed a good reputation in academic circles in Italy and was made head of the maths department at Padua University.

Galileo had invented a military compass around this time which was of great interest and use to military commanders in the Italian states. Through this invention, he became widely known and respected and also a wealthy man. Around the same period he met and fell for Marina Gamba who bore three of his children although they never married and never lived together.

In 1609 he heard through friends about the invention of a telescope in Holland. For a man interested in astronomy, this was a gripping piece of news as no-one up to this point had been able to see distant objects closely. He set about making his own and within a month, he produced a powerful telescope through which he could observe the night sky. A year later, he identifies what he thinks are Jupiter’s satellites. He also deduced what Copernicus identified: that the earth orbits the sun. It was considered heretical by the Church to support the idea that the earth moves as, according to a literal interpretation of the Bible, the earth was a fixed point in the universe, around which everything rotated.

Galileo published his findings in a book which appeared in 1632 when he was 68 years old. He was arrested and detained by the Inquisition for saying that the earth moved around the sun. After several weeks in prison, he recanted and agreed to modify his opinions to avoid a severe sentence. He was subsequently kept under house arrest at his home for the following 10 years until his death.

In 2000, Pope John Paul II officially pardoned Galileo, 367 years after his trial at the Vatican in 1633.

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