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Galileo: Writings
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It was ... the Church, under the aegis of Pope Gregory XIII, that introduced the "major achievement of modern astronomy"9 when Galileo was in his teens. The Western world still marked time by the Julian calendar created in 46 B.C. By Galileo’s day, the calendar was 12 days off, leaving Church feasts woefully behind the seasons for which they were intended. A number of pontiffs had attempted to correct the problem, but it was Pope Gregory XIII who was able to present a more accurate calendar in 1582. Though Protestant Europe fumed at the imposition of "popish time," the accuracy of Gregory’s calendar led to its acceptance throughout the West and, essentially, throughout the world by the 20th century.
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Galileo was 68 years old and sick. Threatened with torture, he publically confessed that he had been wrong to have said that the Earth moves around the Sun. Legend then has it that after his confession, Galileo quietly whispered "And yet, it moves."
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In 1638 Galileo described an experimental method to measure the speed of light by arranging that two observers, each having lanterns equipped with shutters, observe each other's lanterns at some distance. The first observer opens the shutter of his lamp, and, the second, upon seeing the light, immediately opens the shutter of his own lantern. The time between the first observer's opening his shutter and seeing the light from the second observer's lamp indicates the time it takes light to travel back and forth between the two observers. Galileo reported that when he tried this at a distance of less than a mile, he was unable to determine whether or not the light appeared instantaneously.[57] Sometime between Galileo's death and 1667, the members of the Florentine Accademia del Cimento repeated the experiment over a distance of about a mile and obtained a similarly inconclusive result.[58]
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In Venice on a holiday in 1609, Galileo heard rumors that a Dutch spectacle-maker had invented a device that made distant objects seem near at hand. A patent had been requested, but not yet granted, and the methods were being kept secret, since it was obviously of tremendous military value for Holland.
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Galileo was born at Pisa in 1564 which was then part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, ruled by Cosimo de Medici. He was taught for the early part of his life by monks at Vallombrosa. At seventeen, he went on to the University of Pisa to read medicine, but disliked the course, which followed strictly the texts of Aristotle and Galen and his interest soon turned to philosophy and mathematics. He left university in 1585, with an interest in mathematics that was to remain with him all his life.
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When Galileo was born, Italy was not called Italy. Instead, Italy was made up of independent city-states. The city-states were in regions controlled by powerful families. Pisa was located in the Tuscany region and controlled by the Medici family.
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