Lista 1 galileo biography

In , his contract with the University of Pisa was not renewed. Galileo quickly found a new position at the University of Padua , teaching geometry, mechanics and astronomy. The appointment was fortunate, for his father had died in , leaving Galileo entrusted with the care of his younger brother. During his year tenure at Padua, he gave entertaining lectures and attracted large crowds of followers, further increasing his fame and his sense of mission.

In , Galileo met Marina Gamba, a Venetian woman, who bore him three children out of wedlock: daughters Virginia and Livia, and son Vincenzo. He never married Marina, possibly due to financial worries and possibly fearing his illegitimate children would threaten his social standing. Galileo worried his daughters would never marry well, and when they were older, had them enter a convent.

Maria Celeste remained in contact and supported her father through letters until her death. No letters from Arcangela survive. In July , Galileo learned about a simple telescope built by Dutch eyeglass makers and soon developed one of his own. In August, he demonstrated it to some Venetian merchants, who saw its value for navigation and spotting ships.

The merchants gave Galileo a salary to manufacture several of them. Using his telescope to explore the universe, Galileo observed the moon and found Venus had phases like the moon, proving it rotated around the sun, which refuted the Aristotelian doctrine that the Earth was the center of the universe. In , he published his observations of sunspots, which also refuted Aristotelian doctrine that the sun was perfect.

Galileo published a number of books throughout his career, including:. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems , a discussion among three people: one who supports Copernicus' heliocentric theory of the universe, one who argues against it, and one who is impartial. Though Galileo claimed Dialogues was neutral, it was clearly not.

The advocate of Aristotelian belief comes across as the simpleton, getting caught in his own arguments. This first science, misleadingly, has been called the science of the strength of materials, and so seems to have found a place in the history of engineering, since such a course is still taught today. However, this first science is not about the strength of materials per se.

It is Galileo's attempt to provide a mathematical science of his unified matter. See Machamer b, Machamer and Hepburn , and the detailed work by Biener Galileo realizes that before he can work out a science of the motion of matter, he must have some way of showing that the nature of matter may be mathematically characterized. Both the mathematical nature of matter and the mathematical principles of motion, he believed, belong to the science of mechanics, which is the name he gives for this new way of philosophizing.

So it is in Day One that he begins to discuss how to describe, mathematically or geometrically , the causes of how beams break. He is searching for the mathematical description of the essential nature of matter. He considers certain problems that use infinite atoms as basis and continues on giving reasons for various properties that matter has.

Among these are the constitution of matter, properties of matter due to heaviness, the properties of the media within which bodies move and what is the cause of a body's coherence cohesion as a single material body. The most famous of these discussions is his account of acceleration of falling bodies, that whatever their weight would fall equally fast in a vacuum.

The Second Day lays out the mathematical principles concerning how bodies break. He accomplishes this by reducing the problems of matter to problems of the lever and the balance, something he had started working on back in However, this time he believes he is getting it right by showing mathematically how bits of matter solidify and stick together, and by describing when they break.

The second science, Days Three and Four of Discorsi , dealt with proper principles of local motion, but this was now motion for all matter not just sublunary stuff and it took the categories of time and acceleration as basic. Interestingly, Galileo, here again, felt the need to include some anti-Aristotelian arguments about motion just as he had done back in Galileo then suggests joining the bodies together.

If Aristotle were right, the lightness of the small one ought to slow down the faster larger one, and so they together should fall at a lesser speed than the heavy body alone. Then he produces his punch line: one might also conceive of the two bodies joined as being one even larger body, in which case it should fall even more quickly than the larger of the two separated bodies.

So there is a contradiction in the Aristotelian position Palmieri b. Galileo's projected Fifth Day would have treated the grand principle of the impact power of matter in motion. He calls it the force of percussion, which deals with two bodies interacting. This problem he does not solve, and it won't be solved until Descartes, probably following Beeckman, turns the problem into finding the equilibrium points for colliding bodies.

The sketch above provides the basis for understanding Galileo's development. He has a new science of matter, a new physical cosmography, and a new science of local motion. In all these he is using a mathematical mode of description based upon, though somewhat changed from, the proportional geometry of Euclid, Book VI and Archimedes for details on the change see Palmieri It is in this way that Galileo developed the new categories of the mechanical new science, the science of matter and motion.

His new categories utilized some of the basic principles of traditional mechanics, to which he added the category of time and so emphasized acceleration. Throughout, he was working out the details about the nature of matter so that it could be understood as uniform and treated in a way that allowed for coherent discussion of the principles of motion.

Thereafter, matter really mattered. No account of Galileo's importance to philosophy can be complete if it does not discuss Galileo's condemnation and the Galileo affair Finocchiaro The end of the episode is simply stated. In January , a very ill Galileo made an arduous journey to Rome. Finally, in April Galileo was called before the Holy Office.

Lista 1 galileo biography

This was tantamount to a charge of heresy, and he was called to repent Shea and Artigas, f. Specifically, he had been charged with teaching and defending the Copernican doctrine that holds that the Sun is at the center of the universe and that the Earth moves. This doctrine had been deemed heretical in , and Copernicus' book had been placed on the index of prohibited books, pending correction.

Galileo was summoned four times for a hearing; the last call came on June 21, The next day, 22 June, Galileo was taken to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, and ordered to kneel while his sentence was read. Galileo was made to recite and sign a formal abjuration:. Galileo was not imprisoned, but had his sentence commuted to house arrest.

In December he was allowed to retire to his villa in Arcetri, outside of Florence. During this time he finished his last book, Discourses on the Two New Sciences , which was published in , in Holland, by Louis Elzivier. The book does not mention Copernicanism at all, and Galileo professed amazement at how it could have been published.

He died on January 8, There has been much controversy over the events leading up to Galileo's trial, and it seems that each year we learn more about what actually happened. There is also controversy over the legitimacy of the charges against Galileo, both in terms of their content and judicial procedure. The were also a number of political factors such as the Counter Reformation, the 30 Years War, and the problems with the papacy of Urban VIII that served as further impetus to Galileo's condemnation.

McMullin, ed. Legitimacy of the content, that is, of the condemnation of Copernicus, is much more problematic. Galileo had addressed this problem in , when he wrote his Letter to Castelli which becomes known as the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. In this letter he had argued that, of course, the Bible was an inspired text, yet two truths could not contradict one another.

So in cases where it was known that science had achieved a true result, the Bible ought to be interpreted in such a way that makes it compatible with this truth. The Bible, he argued, was an historical document written for common people at an historical time, and it had to be written in language that would make sense to them and lead them towards the true religion.

McMullin has shown how Galileo's arguments were similar to those of Augustine. Much philosophical controversy, before and after Galileo's time, devolves around this doctrine of the two truths and their seeming incompatibility. Cardinal Bellarmine was willing to countenance scientific truth if it could be proven or demonstrated McMullin But Bellarmine held that the planetary theories of Ptolemy and Copernicus and presumably Tycho Brahe were only hypotheses and due to their mathematical, purely calculatory character were not susceptible to physical proof.

This is a sort of instrumentalist, anti-realist position Duhem, Machamer There are any number of ways to argue for some sort of instrumentalism. Duhem himself argued that science is not metaphysics, and so only deals with useful conjectures that enable us to systematize the phenomena. Subtler versions, without an Aquinian metaphysical bias, of this position have been argued subsequently and more fully by van Fraassen and others.

Less sweepingly, it could reasonably be argued that both Ptolemy and Copernicus' theories were primarily mathematical, and that what Galileo was defending was not Copernicus' theory per se, but a physical realization of it. Galileo wrote to his friend Paolo Sarpi, a fine mathematician who was consultor to the Venetian government, in and it is clear from his letter that by this time he had realised his mistake.

In fact he had returned to work on the theory of motion in and over the following two years, through his study of inclined planes and the pendulum, he had formulated the correct law of falling bodies and had worked out that a projectile follows a parabolic path. However, these famous results would not be published for another 35 years.

In May , Galileo received a letter from Paolo Sarpi telling him about a spyglass that a Dutchman had shown in Venice. Galileo wrote in the Starry Messenger Sidereus Nuncius in April :- About ten months ago a report reached my ears that a certain Fleming had constructed a spyglass by means of which visible objects, though very distant from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen as if nearby.

Of this truly remarkable effect several experiences were related, to which some persons believed while other denied them. A few days later the report was confirmed by a letter I received from a Frenchman in Paris, Jacques Badovere, which caused me to apply myself wholeheartedly to investigate means by which I might arrive at the invention of a similar instrument.

This I did soon afterwards, my basis being the doctrine of refraction. From these reports, and using his own technical skills as a mathematician and as a craftsman, Galileo began to make a series of telescopes whose optical performance was much better than that of the Dutch instrument. His first telescope was made from available lenses and gave a magnification of about four times.

To improve on this Galileo learned how to grind and polish his own lenses and by August he had an instrument with a magnification of around eight or nine. Galileo immediately saw the commercial and military applications of his telescope which he called a perspicillum for ships at sea. He kept Sarpi informed of his progress and Sarpi arranged a demonstration for the Venetian Senate.

They were very impressed and, in return for a large increase in his salary, Galileo gave the sole rights for the manufacture of telescopes to the Venetian Senate. It seems a particularly good move on his part since he must have known that such rights were meaningless, particularly since he always acknowledged that the telescope was not his invention!

By the end of Galileo had turned his telescope on the night sky and began to make remarkable discoveries. Swerdlow writes see [ 16 ] :- In about two months, December and January, he made more discoveries that changed the world than anyone has ever made before or since. The astronomical discoveries he made with his telescopes were described in a short book called the Starry Messenger published in Venice in May This work caused a sensation.

Galileo claimed to have seen mountains on the Moon, to have proved the Milky Way was made up of tiny stars, and to have seen four small bodies orbiting Jupiter. These last, with an eye to getting a position in Florence, he quickly named 'the Medicean stars'. The Venetian Senate, perhaps realising that the rights to manufacture telescopes that Galileo had given them were worthless, froze his salary.

However he had succeeded in impressing Cosimo and, in June , only a month after his famous little book was published, Galileo resigned his post at Padua and became Chief Mathematician at the University of Pisa without any teaching duties and 'Mathematician and Philosopher' to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In he visited Rome where he was treated as a leading celebrity; the Collegio Romano put on a grand dinner with speeches to honour Galileo's remarkable discoveries.

He was also made a member of the Accademia dei Lincei in fact the sixth member and this was an honour which was especially important to Galileo who signed himself 'Galileo Galilei Linceo' from this time on. While in Rome, and after his return to Florence, Galileo continued to make observations with his telescope. Already in the Starry Messenger he had given rough periods of the four moons of Jupiter, but more precise calculations were certainly not easy since it was difficult to identify from an observation which moon was I, which was II, which III, and which IV.

He made a long series of observations and was able to give accurate periods by At one stage in the calculations he became very puzzled since the data he had recorded seemed inconsistent, but he had forgotten to take into account the motion of the Earth round the sun. Galileo first turned his telescope on Saturn on 25 July and it appeared as three bodies his telescope was not good enough to show the rings but made them appear as lobes on either side of the planet.

Continued observations were puzzling indeed to Galileo as the bodies on either side of Saturn vanished when the ring system was edge on. Also in he discovered that, when seen in the telescope, the planet Venus showed phases like those of the Moon, and therefore must orbit the Sun not the Earth. This did not enable one to decide between the Copernican system, in which everything goes round the Sun, and that proposed by Tycho Brahe in which everything but the Earth and Moon goes round the Sun which in turn goes round the Earth.

Most astronomers of the time in fact favoured Brahe 's system and indeed distinguishing between the two by experiment was beyond the instruments of the day. However, Galileo knew that all his discoveries were evidence for Copernicanism, although not a proof. In fact it was his theory of falling bodies which was the most significant in this respect, for opponents of a moving Earth argued that if the Earth rotated and a body was dropped from a tower it should fall behind the tower as the Earth rotated while it fell.

Since this was not observed in practice this was taken as strong evidence that the Earth was stationary. However Galileo already knew that a body would fall in the observed manner on a rotating Earth. Other observations made by Galileo included the observation of sunspots. He reported these in Discourse on floating bodies which he published in and more fully in Letters on the sunspots which appeared in Since they had been born outside of marriage, Galileo believed that they themselves should never marry.

Although Galileo put forward many revolutionary correct theories, he was not correct in all cases. In particular when three comets appeared in he became involved in a controversy regarding the nature of comets. He argued that they were close to the Earth and caused by optical refraction. A serious consequence of this unfortunate argument was that the Jesuits began to see Galileo as a dangerous opponent.

Despite his private support for Copernicanism, Galileo tried to avoid controversy by not making public statements on the issue. However he was drawn into the controversy through Castelli who had been appointed to the chair of mathematics in Pisa in Castelli had been a student of Galileo's and he was also a supporter of Copernicus. Castelli defended the Copernican position vigorously and wrote to Galileo afterwards telling him how successful he had been in putting the arguments.

Galileo, less convinced that Castelli had won the argument, wrote Letter to Castelli to him arguing that the Bible had to be interpreted in the light of what science had shown to be true. Galileo had several opponents in Florence and they made sure that a copy of the Letter to Castelli was sent to the Inquisition in Rome. However, after examining its contents they found little to which they could object.

The Catholic Church's most important figure at this time in dealing with interpretations of the Holy Scripture was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. He seems at this time to have seen little reason for the Church to be concerned regarding the Copernican theory. The point at issue was whether Copernicus had simply put forward a mathematical theory which enabled the calculation of the positions of the heavenly bodies to be made more simply or whether he was proposing a physical reality.

At this time Bellarmine viewed the theory as an elegant mathematical one which did not threaten the established Christian belief regarding the structure of the universe. In Galileo wrote the Letter to the Grand Duchess which vigorously attacked the followers of Aristotle. In this work, which he addressed to the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, he argued strongly for a non-literal interpretation of Holy Scripture when the literal interpretation would contradict facts about the physical world proved by mathematical science.

In this Galileo stated quite clearly that for him the Copernican theory is not just a mathematical calculating tool, but is a physical reality:- I hold that the Sun is located at the centre of the revolutions of the heavenly orbs and does not change place, and that the Earth rotates on itself and moves around it. I confirm this view not only by refuting Ptolemy 's and Aristotle 's arguments, but also by producing many for the other side, especially some pertaining to physical effects whose causes perhaps cannot be determined in any other way, and other astronomical discoveries; these discoveries clearly confute the Ptolemaic system, and they agree admirably with this other position and confirm it.

The cardinals of the Inquisition met on 24 February and took evidence from theological experts. They condemned the teachings of Copernicus , and Bellarmine conveyed their decision to Galileo who had not been personally involved in the trial. Galileo was forbidden to hold Copernican views but later events made him less concerned about this decision of the Inquisition.

This happened just as Galileo's book Il saggiatore The Assayer was about to be published by the Accademia dei Lincei in and Galileo was quick to dedicate this work to the new Pope. The work described Galileo's new scientific method and contains a famous quote regarding mathematics:- Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze.

Each interlocutor sought to understand the other's point of view and the validity of their arguments. Sanctions followed immediately. The sale of the "Dialogue" was banned, and Galileo was called to trial in Rome. The trial lasted from April to June , and on June 22, at the same church where Giordano Bruno had received his death sentence, Galileo, kneeling, uttered the prescribed recantation.

In the final years of his life, he had to work under the harshest conditions. He lived under house arrest at his villa in Arcetri Florence under constant supervision by the Inquisition. It was during this time, for a period of two years, that Galileo wrote "Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations" where he presented the foundations of dynamics.

In May , the scientist negotiated the publication of his work in the Netherlands and secretly sent the manuscript there. The "Discourses" were published in Nieuw-Leyden in July , almost a year later, the book reached Arcetri in June By that time, the sick and blind Galileo could only touch his creation with his hands. Galileo Galilei died on January 8, He was buried in the monastic chapel of the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence without honors or a tombstone.