DESERET MORNING NEWS, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2008
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“I render infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries.”
– Excerpt from “Galileo’s Daughter,” by Dava Sobel
Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Justus Sustermans
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
ALILEO WAS A 17th century astronomer who focused on the night sky. He also invented several devices that have contributed to the advancement of science and technology.
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
Smithsonian Institution exhibition: Journeys of the Mind: Explaining the Heavens Leiden: I.A. Huguetan, 1641, Gift of the Burndy Library
The Copernican theory
Galileo supported the Copernican theory that planets orbit around the sun, a “heresy” that contradicted the long-held theory of the early Roman Catholic Church that the Earth was the center of the universe. An institution of the church that dealt with heresy, the Inquisition warned Galileo not to defend Copernicus’ theories. Pope Urban VIII allowed Galileo to treat the theories as mathematical observations; however, Galileo continued in his belief that the sun was the center of the universe and published his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” in 1632. In reality, Galileo believed in God and did not intend to Galileo observed through his telescope that the offend the church. However, following surface of the moon was pocked with craters. the publication of the “Dialogue,” the Inquisition called Galileo in for questioning once again. He was forced to recant the heliocentric theory. Upon his knees in 1633, Galileo agreed to publicly recant in order to avoid torture and death. The Inquisition Pope Urban VIII n VII III sentenced Galileo to house arrest. During the last years of his life, Galileo finished his work, “Discourses on the Two New Sciences,” which was smuggled into the Netherlands and published six years before his death. Galileo was a pioneer of astronomy and physics. His work influenced the likes of great scientific and philosophic thinkers, including Albert Einstein, Issac Newton and Ernst Cassirer.
Galileo’s great 1632 treatise, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo . . . (“Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”).
The telescope
By the 13th century, technological advances in Italy led to the development of lenses that would serve the optical needs of Italians. This same technology provided an opportunity to create a device that was necessary to more closely observe extraterrestrial bodies, such as the stars and planets. Experimentation with the glass eventually led to the development of one of the earliest telescopes, created in 16th century England by Leonard and Thomas Digges. By 1608, an advanced telescope was unveiled in the Netherlands, and it spread across Europe into Italy. With the blueprints of these early examples, Galileo created three different telescopes throughout the following year. These instruments allowed Galileo to observe not only the planetary bodies themselves but also their surfaces. Although modern-day telescopes allow us to observe far beyond what Galileo could, much of the device’s advancement came from his experimentation.
Pendulum clock
A popular story describing the invention of the pendulum clock involves a young Galileo who, instead of paying attention during a church service, observed the rotational habits of a swinging chandelier. With his pulse, Galileo measured the time it took for the chandelier to swing around once. He postulated that the weight of the pendulum swung did not make a difference in the time. Instead, he determined that the time needed for a pendulum to complete one circulation is directly proportioned to the square root of the length of the string or cable holding the pendulum. Invented in 1660, the pendulum became a new device to measure time.
INVENTIONS
The Galileo spacecraft took this image of the moon in 1992, on its way to explore the Jupiter system.
The thermoscope
After centuries of mystery concerning the measurement of heat, a group of scientists (including Galileo) in Venice developed a device called the thermoscope. Prior to the invention of the thermoscope, the standard medium for temperature measurement was through the touch of the hand. Thus, a newly developed thermometer became one of the inventions of the 17th century and a part of the Scientific Revolution. Although a universal standard of heat measurement was not adopted until the following century, Galileo and his scientist friends made scientific advances that allowed another generation of scientists to develop what would become the thermometers used in the medical field today.
Galileo spacecraft
Galileo was an unmanned spacecraft launched in 1989 by the space shuttle Atlantis with the purpose of studying the planet Jupiter and its moons. On Sept. 21, 2003, when its onboard fuel was nearly depleted, Galileo was deliberately destroyed, plunging into Jupiter’s crushing atmosphere. By eliminating the chance of impact with the surface of the moon Europa, one of the Galileo mission’s own discoveries — a possible ocean beneath Europa’s icy crust — was protected. Galileo changed the way we look at our solar system. The spacecraft was the first to fly past an asteroid and the first to discover a moon of an asteroid. It provided the only direct observations of a comet colliding with a planet.
solarsystem.nasa.gov/galileo
Galileo had the misfortune of being a brilliant radical thinker in an age when new ideas were considered dangerous. But he paved the way for the famous English physicist Isaac Newton, who was born in 1642, the year Galileo died. Newton lived in an age enthusiastic for new discoveries, receiving lasting recognition for his revolutionary accomplishments in the fields of
DESIGN BY LOU ANN REINEKE, DESERET MORNING NEWS
NASA/JPL/GALILEO SPACECRAFT
Sir Isaac Newton 1642-1727
mathematics, optics and physics. Newton used one of Galileo’s mathematical descriptions, the law of inertia, as the foundation for his first law of motion.
LEARN MORE
The Galileo Project is an ongoing Web source for information on the life and work of of Galileo.
galileo.rice.edu/science.html
The planet Jupiter's four largest moons are called the Galilean satellites, after Italian astronomer Galileo, who observed them in 1610.The German astronomer Simon Marius claimed to have seen the moons around the same time, but he did not publish his observations, and so Galileo is given the credit for their discovery. These large moons, named Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, are each distinctive worlds.