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Galileo: Galileo Project
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For most people, in the 17th Century as well as today, Galileo was and is the ‘hero’ of modern science. Galileo discovered many things: with his telescope, he was the first to observe the moons of Jupiter and discuss the mountains on the Moon; he determined the parabolic path of projectiles and calculated the law of free fall on the basis of experiment. He is known for defending and making popular the Copernican system, using the telescope to examine the heavens, inventing the microscope, dropping stones from towers and masts, playing with pendula and clocks, being the first ‘real’ experimental scientist, advocating the relativity of motion, and creating a mathematical physics. His major claim to fame probably comes from his trial by the Catholic Inquisition and his purported role as heroic rational, modern man in the subsequent history of the ‘warfare’ between science and religion. This is no small set of accomplishments for one 17th Century Italian, who was the son of a court musician and who left the University of Pisa without a degree.
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Galileo, in consequence of this and other troubles, found it prudent to quit Pisa and betake himself to Florence, the original home of his family. By the influence of friends with the Venetian Senate he was nominated in 1592 to the chair of mathematics in the University of Padua, which he occupied for eighteen years, with ever-increasing renown. He afterwards betook himself to Florence, being appointed philosopher and mathematician extraordinary to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. During the whole of this period, and to the close of his life, his investigation of Nature, in all her fields, was unwearied. Following up his experiments at Pisa with others upon inclined planes, Galileo established the laws of falling bodies as they are still formulated. He likewise demonstrated the laws of projectiles, and largely anticipated the laws of motion as finally established by Newton.
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Galileo may have known this fact from his experiments as early as 1608; ... he didn’t publish his findings on projectiles until 1638, when they appear in the second part of his monumental Two New Sciences. Six years earlier, his former student Bonaventura Cavalieri, a Jesuit, wrote a book called Speccio Ustoria, in which he became the first to go to press with a mathematical proof of parabolic trajectories. Not surprisingly, having had his thunder and the results of three decades of careful research stolen, or heavily borrowed, in this way, Galileo wasn’t amused. And it says something of his magnanimity that he and Cavalieri were later reconciled after the younger man offered an apology.
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The Galileo Project was originally conceived as a mission to study Jupiter and its satellites. Most early plans for this mission called for direct flights to Jupiter. After new constraints were placed on shuttle operations after the Challenger accident and the Centaur program was cancelled, a direct flight to Jupiter became impossible. A new flight plan was developed that involved flybys of Venus and Earth to provide “gravity assists” that would help the spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. Although this method greatly increased the time it would take Galileo to arrive at Jupiter, it did provide opportunities for the spacecraft to pass by and examine several other bodies. The new flight path included two flybys of Earth, during which Galileo was able to obtain a number of photographs of the Moon.
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The final chapter of Galileo's scientific story comes in 1638 with the publication of Discourses of the Two New Sciences. The second science, discussed (so to speak) in the last two days, dealt with the principles of local motion. These have been much commented upon in the Galilean literature. Here is where he enunciates the law of free fall, the parabolic path for projectiles and his physical “discoveries” (Drake 1999, v. 2). But the first two days, the development of his first science, has been much misunderstood and little discussed. This first science, misleadingly, has been called the science of the strength of materials, and so seems to have found a place in the history of engineering, since such a course is still taught today.
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By 1616 the attacks on Galileo had reached a head, and he went to Rome to try to persuade the Church authorities not to ban his ideas. In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothetically. For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616.
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