Galileo Facts
Galileo Galilei was an Italian scientist who helped open the eyes
of the world to a new way of thinking about the workings of our solar system
and astronomy in general.
Read on for interesting facts, quotes and information about Galileo.
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Galileo Galilei was born in
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Galileo was a ground breaking astronomer, physicist,
mathematician, philosopher and inventor. Among his inventions were telescopes,
a compass and a thermometer.
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Galileo enrolled to do a medical degree at the
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Galileo built on the work of others to create a telescope with
around 3x magnification, he later improved on this to make telescopes with
around 30x magnification.
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With these telescopes, Galileo was able to observe the skies in
ways previously not achieved. In 1610 he made observations of 4 objects
surrounding Jupiter that behaved unlike stars, these turned out to be Jupiter’s
for largest satellite moons: Io, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. They were later
renamed the Galilean satellites in honour of Galileo himself.
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The discovery of these moons was not supported by the scientific
principles of the time and Galileo had trouble convincing some people that he
had indeed discovered such objects. This was similar to other ideas put forward
by Galileo that were very controversial at the time.
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The Geocentric model of the universe which was embraced by earlier
astronomers had the Earth at the centre of the universe with other objects
moving around it. Work by Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler
helped to supercede this theory with the more accurate heliocentric model. Such
a view of the universe differed strongly with the beliefs of the Catholic
Church at the time and Galileo was forced to withdraw many of his ideas and
even spent the final years of his life under house arrest.
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Galileo refused to believe Kepler’s theory that the moon caused
the tides, instead believing it was due to the nature of the Earth’s rotation
(helping prove that even the smartest people can make mistakes).
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Famous Galileo quotes include: “In questions of science the
authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single
individual.”
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“See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first
glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of
the contrary.”
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Thursday, 24 October 2013
6th Grade - Geography - Telescopes and Galileo
The class were given the chance to understand about Telescopes and Galileo in today's lesson.
