Galileo
by Al Bourassa
Title
Galileo
Artist
Al Bourassa
Medium
Photograph - Photographic Artworks
Description
Galileo, in full Galileo Galilei, (born February 15, 1564, Pisa [Italy]—died January 8, 1642, Arcetri, near Florence), Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the scientific method. His formulation of (circular) inertia, the law of falling bodies, and parabolic trajectories marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the study of motion. His insistence that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics changed natural philosophy from a verbal, qualitative account to a mathematical one in which experimentation became a recognized method for discovering the facts of nature. Finally, his discoveries with the telescope revolutionized astronomy and paved the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric system, but his advocacy of that system eventually resulted in an Inquisition process against him.
Galileo's championing of heliocentrism and Copernicanism was controversial during his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geocentrism or the Tychonic system. He met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism because of the absence of an observed stellar parallax.
In 1609 Galileo Galilei, using his own telescope, modeled on an invention recently made in the Netherlands, discovered that the Moon, far from being smooth and utterly unlike Earth, had mountains and craters. By using the lengths of their shadows, Galileo was even able to measure the heights of the Moon’s mountains. A number of nebulae resolved into swarms of individual small stars. Even the Milky Way was made of stars. Perhaps the most exciting find was the discovery of four moons revolving about Jupiter. These discoveries were announced in Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger, 1610), the book that made his reputation. Although none of these discoveries directly supported the Copernican theory, they all lent indirect support in that they made the new cosmology less objectionable. That Jupiter has satellites cannot prove that Earth goes around the Sun, but it showed that there was at least one other centre of revolution than Earth. It also showed that a moving planet could carry its satellites along with it (as Earth does the Moon in the Copernican view). The later discovery that Venus ran through a complete set of phases like the Moon definitely ruled out the Ptolemaic idea that Venus lay below the solar sphere, but it did not rule out a theory like Tycho Brahe’s, in which Venus circled the Sun while the Sun moved around Earth.
The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that heliocentrism was "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture." Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated him and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point. He was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. While under house arrest, he wrote one of his best-known works, Two New Sciences, in which he summarized work he had done some forty years earlier on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials.
This digitally altered artwork is derived from a photograph taken March 10, 2009 in the streets of Firenza (Florence) Italy during a tour of Western Europe.
Final processing done with Smart Photo Editor.
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Uploaded
March 27th, 2018
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