Galileo Galilei
1564–1642 1 entry
Biography
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer, physicist and mathematician, often called the father of modern science. Born in Pisa in 1564, he left the study of medicine for mathematics, which he went on to teach at the universities of Pisa and Padua. He studied falling bodies and the swing of the pendulum, and insisted that nature must be questioned through experiment and described in the language of mathematics.
In 1609 he built a telescope of his own and turned it to the sky, discovering the mountains of the Moon, the phases of Venus and four moons circling Jupiter. These discoveries convinced him that Copernicus was right and the Earth moves around the Sun, a view he defended in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems of 1632. The next year the Inquisition tried him, forced him to renounce it and placed him under house arrest at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence. There, going blind, he wrote his Two New Sciences and died in 1642; in 1992 the Catholic Church acknowledged that his judges had been wrong.
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