galileo+galilei



Galileo was born in Pisa, Tuscany, on February 15, 1564, the oldest son of Vincenzo Galilei, a musician who made important contributions to the theory and practice of music and who may have performed some experiments with Galileo in 1588-89 on the relationship between pitch and the tension of strings. When he reached the age of ten, Galileo left Pisa to join his family in Florence and there he was tutored by Jacopo Borghini

Once he was old enough to be educated in a monastery, his parents sent him to the Camaldolese Monastery at Vallombrosa which is situated on a magnificent forested hillside 33 km southeast of Florence.

The Order combined the solitary life of the hermit with the strict life of the monk and soon the young Galileo found this life an attractive one. But this did not please his father who had already decided that his eldest son should become a medical doctor.

In 1585 Galileo left the university without having obtained a degree, and for several years he gave private lessons in the mathematical subjects in Florence and Siena.

During this period he designed a new form of hydrostatic balance for weighing small quantities and wrote a short treatise, La bilancetta ("The Little Balance"), that circulated in manuscript form.

Galileo explained falling and rising action with two forces: **gravity, and buoyancy.**

His equation to calculate falling objects.

He also began his studies on motion, which he pursued steadily for the next two decades.

His patrons, however, secured him the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua, where he taught from 1592 until 1610.

By trial and error, he quickly figured out the secret of the invention and made his own three-powered spyglass from lenses for sale in spectacle makers' shops.


 * He was not the first to create a telescope.**

Galileo was now one of the highest-paid professors at the university

In December he drew the Moon's phases as seen through the telescope, showing that the Moon's surface is not smooth, as had been thought, but is rough and uneven.

In January 1610 he discovered four moons revolving around Jupiter.

He also found that the telescope showed many more stars than are visible with the naked eye.

He named the moons of Jupiter after the Medici family: the //Sidera Medicea//, or //Medicean Stars// Galileo was rewarded with an appointment as mathematician and philosopher of the grand duke of Tuscany, and in the fall of 1610 he returned in triumph to his native land.

Before he left Padua he had discovered the puzzling appearance of Saturn, later to be shown as caused by a ring surrounding it, and in Florence he discovered that Venus goes through phases just as the Moon does.

As a result, Galileo was confirmed in his belief, which he had probably held for decades but which had not been central to his studies, that the Sun is the centre of the universe and that the Earth is a planet, as Copernicus had argued. Galileo's conversion to Copernicanism would be a key turning point in the scientific revolution.

Galileo had become blind at the age of 72, and he spent his time working with a young student, Vincenzo Viviani, who was with him when he died on January 8, 1642 in Arcetri.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
—**Galileo**


 * http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Galileo.html information**
 * http://www.crystalinks.com/galileo.html picture of telescope**
 * http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96feb/galileo.html his quote**
 * http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/scidiscovery/gravity/galileo.asp his equation**