Galileo

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Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was born at Pisa on the 18th of February in 1564. His father,
Vincenzo Galilei, belonged to a noble family and had gained some distinction as a
musician and a mathematician. At an early age, Galileo manifested his ability to learn
both mathematical and mechanical types of things, but his parents, wishing to turn him
aside from studies which promised no substantial return, steered him toward some sort of
medical profession. But this had no effect on Galileo. During his youth he was allowed to
follow the path that he wished to.

Although in the popular mind Galileo is remembered chiefly as an astronomer,
however, the science of mechanics and dynamics pretty much owe their existence to his
findings. Before he was twenty, observation of the oscillations of a swinging lamp in the
cathedral of Pisa led him to the discovery of the isochronism of the pendulum, which
theory he utilized fifty years later in the construction of an astronomical clock. In 1588, an
essay on the center of gravity in solids obtained for him the title of the Archimedes of his
time, and secured him a teaching spot in the University of Pisa. During the years
immediately following, taking advantage of the celebrated leaning tower, he laid the
foundation experimentally of the theory of falling bodies and demonstrated the falsity of
the peripatetic maxim, which is that an objects rate of descent is proportional to its weight.
When he challenged this it made all of the followers of Aristotle extremely angry, they
would not except the fact that their leader could have been wrong. Galileo, in result of
this and other troubles, found it prudent to quit Pisa and move to Florence, the original
home of his family. In Florence he was nominated by the Venetian Senate in 1592 to the
chair of mathematics in the University of Padua, which he occupied for eighteen years,
with ever-increasing fame. After that he was ap...