Galileo Galilei (b.1564-d.1642)
Galileo Galilei (b.1564-d.1642) was an Italian scientist, mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He is hailed as the father of modern science due to the lasting impressions that his observations had on the study of science and development of the scientific method. Galileo built his first telescope in 1609 to test by improving upon an existing Dutch design (Heilbron 147-151). He went on to discover four the moons of Jupiter, and the mountains on the moon. The moons of Jupiter are now known as Galilean moons. Other contributions Galileo made include determining the parabolic path of projectiles, and also calculated the law of free fall on the basis of experimentation.
Galileo played a major role in promoting the Copernican theory which made him have conflicts with the Catholic Church. In 1616, the Church banned the book Nicholas Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus by placing it on the Index of Prohibited Books under the charges of heresy (Heilbron 218). We now see this book by Copernicus as the first modern scientific argument for the heliocentric model. He published the “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” where he attempted to ‘present arguments for both sides’ of the heliocentric model. Galileo was summoned by the by the theological authorities for teaching heresy, and was imprisoned in the last years of life to house arrest. It was during this time that Galileo summarized his experiments and penned them. He would die seven years later in 1642 from an illness while in house arrest.
Due to Galileo’s experiments in the laws of motion, he discovered that objects accelerate uniformly regardless of their mass and size. These observations in particular would pave the way for the unification of the laws of classical motion by Sir Isaac Newton. Galileo’s heliocentric model was improved by German scientist Johannes Kepler and soon became scientific fact (Heilbron 176). This modification by Kepler is the fact that planetary motions follow an elliptical path around the sun.