Galileo Galilei's contributions to science were many. In fact, his ideas were so revolutionary that they almost cost him his life..
"But it moves", is the phrase that, according to tradition, Galileo Galilei pronounced after leaving a trial of the Holy Inquisition, where he had been forced to admit that his theories were false.
At that trial, Galilei was asked to renounce his idea that the Earth revolved around the sun and admit instead that the Earth was the center of the Universe..
The latter was an idea that was very convenient for the Catholic Church, but it was not the scientific truth. Therefore, although Galileo saved his life, he came out of the trial stating: "but it moves".
At that time, the Catholic Church put a brake on any attempt to progress science and, in that sense, Galileo Galilei revolutionized the world of astronomy and physics, with discoveries that surpassed the ideas of the moment..
Galileo Galilei had many facets, he was a mathematician, a physicist and an astronomer Italian who devoted his life to researching the laws of the Universe.
In fact, their investigations were so advanced that they are the basis of physics and astronomy currently. Today, Galileo Galilei is a reference of obligatory study for those who aspire to study in these fields.
Thanks to this he is considered one of the founders of modern science, in addition to proposing the use of the scientific method in knowledge and this has been crucial in the scientific world.
Galileo was born on February 15, 1564 in Italy, specifically in Pisa. His family was full of merchants, so during his first years of life, he received education at home. His parents managed to train the child until he was 10 years old.
But, Galileo Galilei's parents lacked time, so they moved to Florence and left the boy in the care of a neighbor, a religious man who managed to get Galileo into monastery life to continue his studies..
However, Galileo's father was not religious, so he took his son out of the convent. Fortunately, for the whole of humanity, Galileo Galilei entered the University of Pisa in 1581, there I would study medicine.
However, there was a small detail: Galileo Galilei's passion was not in medicine, nor in this land, but beyond. The good thing about this experience is that Galileo used it to find his true calling: physics.
Thus, from a very young age, Galileo was already beginning to do experiments in the area of mechanics. Of course, this caught the attention of many professors, which is why, at 25, Galileo earned a place as a professor of mathematics at the same University of Pisa.
Later, in 1592, Galileo Galilei moved to Padua and began working as a professor of mechanics, astronomy and geometry. He stayed there for eighteen years, until 1610, and it was during this period that he made his most notorious discoveries..
The problem was the Holy Inquisition, a threat that ran throughout Europe and did not allow scientific progress to advance. Fortunately, Padua was withdrawn from the European center and there, with less repression, Galileo had more time to develop his research.
They were very prolific years, in which, in addition to being a teacher, he came to develop a law to explain the motion of objects by acceleration. He also watched the stars, focused on the foperation of the water pump, studied the magnetism, created a tool to take temperature measurements, among other creations.
In any case, his peak, on a professional level, came in 1609 when he invented the telescope. To do this, he used similar objects and improved them. Thanks to Galileo Galilei, today we know the telescope as it is.
With this instrument, Galilei was able to better observe the sky and the celestial bodies, as nobody had done before and it was in those moments of loneliness and astral observation that he noticed something that nobody had ever noticed: we are not the center of the universe.
Among the main contributions of Galileo Galilei to science are the following:
We are not the center of the universe, as the Church said, but with his observations he was able to show that Copernicus was not wrong. Indeed, the earth spins around the sun.
Is heliocentric theory It has been one of the most important scientific revolutions in the history of science, since it changed the paradigm that was had until then and man was no longer the center of the universe, but was part of a celestial body, among others, that revolved around a star.
Although he did not invent it as such, he did improve it and this allowed him to make his most notable discoveries. Well, the telescopes before his did not allow to see as he did.
Developing the scientific method and implementing it was a crucial point to do true science, because, for Galileo, the hypotheses were necessary and depending on the empirical observations it is that these would be accepted or rejected, but, what should not be done was to take the truths of the Church and make them absolute without having passed them through the first method.
Those laws of motion that Isaac Newton later promulgated had actually been created by Galileo Galilei, so he was the forerunner of the gravitation theory, Well, it was Galilei who noticed that the objects accelerated at the same rate, regardless of the mass, so the force was what caused the movement.
Galileo with his telescope managed to observe things that others did not. This is how he realized that the moon had craters, that there were sun spots, that the planet Venus had several phases, among other things..
Thanks to Galileo Galilei, other scientists began to base their research on mathematics. Well, to understand the order in the universe, numbers are necessary. And this great truth is from Galileo Galilei.
This tool allowed to measure the temperature.
These are some of the contributions of Galileo Galilei to science, among many others that changed the destiny of humanity and the scientific world, forever.
Yet No Comments