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Galileo Galilei
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Galileo Galilei (commonly known as Galileo) was a founder of modern physics and modern astronomy. He was born in Pisa, Italy, in 1564, and was a professor from 1592 through 1610 at Padua, which was part of the Venetian Republic. While in Pisa, he noticed a chandelier swinging in the cathedral and developed the physical law that shows that pendulums of the same length swing in the same time interval. Using a pendulum for timing, he experimentally worked out how objects accelerate while falling. In these experiments, he rolled objects down an inclined plane; the traditional story that he dropped weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa was a myth.
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Galileo Galilei's parents were Vincenzo Galilei and Guilia Ammannati. Vincenzo, who was born in Florence in 1520, was a teacher of music and a fine lute player. After studying music in Venice he carried out experiments on strings to support his musical theories. Guilia, who was born in Pescia, married Vincenzo in 1563 and they made their home in the countryside near Pisa. Galileo was their first child and spent his early years with his family in Pisa.
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In the pantheon of the scientific revolution, Galileo Galilei takes a high position because of his pioneering use of quantitative experiments with results analyzed mathematically. There was no tradition of such methods in European thought at that time; the great experimentalist who immediately preceded Galileo, William Gilbert, did not use a quantitative approach. However, Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, a lutenist and music theorist, had performed experiments in which he discovered what may be the oldest known non-linear relation in physics, between the tension and the pitch of a stretched string. These observations were in the Pythagorean tradition of music, well-known to instrument makers, that whole-number mathematical relationships define harmonious (pleasing) scales. Thus, a limited form of mathematics had long made its way into physical science at the point of music, and young Galileo was in a position to see his own father's observations generalize that relationship still further. Galileo himself would find credit as the first to plainly state that the laws of nature are mathematical, and (as he said) the idea that "the language of God is mathematics."
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Galileo Galilei began his life in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564. Born into a family with noble roots, Galileo's father believed that medicine would be the best profession for his son. Galileo's genius was not to be subdued, though. Soon after enrolling into the University of Pisa to study medicine, Galileo dropped out to pursue his interests in mathematics and mechanics. In 1588, he wrote a treatise on the center of gravity for solids and obtained a lecture-ship at the University of Pisa. By 1592, Galileo was offered a chair in mathematics at the University of Padua, where he stayed for eighteen years.
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Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in 1564, in the same year as Shakespeare, and died in 1642, the birth year of Isaac Newton, his scientific successor. His father was a music teacher and his family of minor noble blood, though not wealthy. In 1581, Galileo began studying at the University of Pisa, where his father hoped he might pursue medicine. But mathematics and science, especially when coupled with a keen observation of nature, proved too powerful a lure for him. Legend has it that, while still a student, Galileo became intrigued by pendulums when he saw a suspended lamp swinging back and forth in the city’s cathedral. Timing the swings with his own pulse, the story goes, he found that the period (the time in which the pendulum completes one trip back and forth) is independent of the arc of the swing.
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Galileo Galilei was born on 15 February 1564 near Pisa, the son of a musician. He began to study medicine at the University of Pisa but changed to philosophy and mathematics. In 1589, he became professor of mathematics at Pisa. In 1592, he moved to become mathematics professor at the University of Padua, a position he held until 1610. During this time he worked on a variety of experiments, including the speed at which different objects fall, mechanics and pendulums.
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