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Galileo Galilei
"founder of modern experimental
science"
Galileo Galilei was one of the most remarkable scientists ever. He
discovered many new ideas and theories and introduced them to mankind.
Galileo helped society as an Italian astronomer and physicist, but how
did he come to be such a great and well-known scientist? It took hard
work and patience....
Galileo was born during the renaissance in Pisa, Italy on February 15,
1564. He was raised by his mom, Giulia Ammanati, and his dad, Vincenzo
Galilei. His family had enough money for school, but they were not rich.
When he was about seven years old, his family moved to Florence where he
started his education. In 1581, his father sent him to the University of
Pisa because he thought his son should be a doctor. For four years, he
studied medicine and the different theories of the scientist Aristotle.
He was not interested in medicine, but soon he became interested in
math. In 1585, he convinced his father to let him leave the school
without a degree.
Galileo was a math tutor for the next four years in Florence. He spent a
lot of the four years studying the scientific thoughts and philosophies
of Aristotle. He also invented an instrument that could find the gravity
of objects. This instrument, called a hydrostatic balance, was used by
weighing the objects in water.
Galileo returned to Pisa in 1589 and became a professor in math. He
taught courses in astronomy at the University of Pisa, based on
Ptolemy's theory that the sun and all of the planets move around the
earth. Teaching these courses, he became more understanding of
astronomy.
In 1592, the University of Padua gave him a professorship in math. He
stayed at that school for eighteen years. He learned and believed
Nicolaus Copernicus's theory that all of the planets move around the
sun, made a mechanical tool called a sector, explained the tides based
on Copernican theory of motion of earth, found that the Milky Way was
made up of many stars, and told people that machines cannot create
power, they can only change it.
In 1602, still at Padua, Galileo did research on motion. The
Aristotelian theory of motion went against the theory that the earth
moves. Because of this, Galileo worked on forming a theory that would
show that the earth does move. He formed a theory that all pendulums
swing at the same rate no matter what size the arc is by watching a
chandelier swing at the cathedral at Pisa.
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