Anayat, Aria Period 4

 During the 1600’s European study was controlled by the Roman Catholic Church and based on the philosopher, Aristotle and his theories.  The church has two main groups that help maintain control, which is the Inquisition and the Order of the Jesuits.  The Inquisition banned books that disagreed with the church’s beliefs.  The Order of the Jesuits worked on specific problems and taught their version of the truth.

 Had many surprisingly accurate ideas about the universe, but was also wrong about many things.  His ideas (even the wrong ones) about science was accepted by the Roman Catholic Church.  Because his ideas were adapted by the Church, saying Aristotle was wrong, was like saying the Bible was wrong.

 He was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564 and died January 8,  He was a stubborn person and refused to accept any theory that had not been subjected to rigorous verification.  He spent his life questioning how physical forces operated Earth.  Throughout his studies and experiments he proved many of Aristotle’s theories wrong.  He used a mathematical equations to help him with his experiments.  Galileo had many important friends that came to help later with his struggle against the Roman Catholic Church.

 One day Galileo was just leaving church and he saw a suspended lamp swinging and started to use his own pulse to measure the period of time between the swings and noticed a pattern.  He left the Church and started to test the hypothesis by tying a weight at the end of the a suspended string and measured time by weighing water that flowed through a narrow tube into a bucket.  Galileo found numerical relations between the length of the pendulum and the time taken to complete a swing.

 Galileo needed more money so he improved on a proportional compass by adding uses for it.  There were many more uses for the compass than before that appealed to other scientists, sailors, and even the military.  Worked out squares and cubes, multiplied, computed compound interest, tested the strength of hulls, measured density, and could measure height and angles which the military used to aim cannons.

 Like the compass Galileo did not “invent” the telescope, he only improved on it.  Early telescopes did magnify distant objects, but it was so blurry that it was almost indistinguishable.  Galileo improved on it by using a thinner convex lens and shortened the focal length of the concave eyepiece.  Galileo was offered a permanent job as a teacher at a university with good pay (he was struggling financially).  This was one of Galileo’s best events of his career, because he started using his telescope to look into space.

 Galileo started looking into the sun and discovered sunspots.  He avoided looking directly into the sun by pointing his telescope at the sun and placing an extra lens at the end of the telescope so the image is projected onto a piece a paper. He then traces over the spots.  Galileo discovered the Sun spun on an axis.  Also by following the movements of the sunspots he found out that the Earth is not the center of the universe, the sun is the center.  After he believed in heliocentrism, Galileo wrote a book of his theory.  The Roman Catholic Church then tried Galileo in court.

 The Roman Catholic Church thought Galileo’s beliefs were foolish and absurd and erroneous of faith.  The Catholic Church demanded him to stop speaking and writing about heliocentrism as more than a hypothesis.  The Pope ordered Galileo to write a book showing Galileo’s beliefs and the Church’s beliefs and at the end it should state that Galileo was wrong.

 This book was written by Galileo in response to the Church’s orders to write a book that showed his and the Catholic Church’s beliefs and admit Galileo was wrong.  Galileo wrote the book, but the ending did not match the Pope’s instructions.  After reading the book the Pope was outraged and Galileo was now tried for heresy.

 After the Pope found out the book that Galileo wrote did not match his instructions, the Pope was deciding his faith.  Galileo had friends that worked in the Inquisition; those friends worked tirelessly to persuade a Pope and stop a possible death sentence.  Thanks to his friends, instead of a cruel death or torture, Galileo was sentenced to house arrest.

 In 1634 Galileo had many problems, both emotional and physical.  In April 1634 his daughter died and he was depressed.  He lost sight in one eye and the other was weakening.  Towards the end of that year he pulled himself together and continued with his research.

 He secretly wrote this book and this was the last book Galileo wrote.  It talked about things nobody thought about before, such as why some materials conduct heat and some do not, motion, and properties of matter.  Galileo was forbidden to publish his work so his friends smuggled it and published it in Holland (it was too far for the Pope or the Church to know about it).

 In autumn of 1641 Galileo was confined to his bed due to illness.  He had severe kidney pains and palpitations of the heart.  On January 8, 1642 Galileo Galilei died in his sleep.

 Galileo invented the telescope.  Wrote books that about his discoveries that inspired readers and thought them about science.  Made “The Age of Enlightenment” grow at an unstoppable pace.  The Roman Catholic Church failed to stop the enlightenment and the Church’s ideas were replaced.

 White, Mich. Galileo Galilei Inventor, Astronomer, and Rebel. New York: Blackbirch,  MacLachlan, James. Galileo Galilei First Physicist. New York: Oxford University Press,  Boerst, William. Galileo Galilei and the Science of Motion. North Carolina: Morgan Reynolds Publishing, 2004.