Sex: Male

Birthday: February 15, 1564

Hometown: Pisa, Italy

Galileo is a great Italian physicist and astronomer, the forerunner of the scientific revolution. Historically, he was the first to integrate the three disciplines of mathematics, physics and astronomy on the basis of scientific experiments, expanding, deepening and changing the human understanding of the movement of matter and the universe. Galileo devoted his life to confirming and spreading the heliocentric theory of N. Copernicus. As a result, he was persecuted by the Church in his later years and imprisoned for life. With systematic experiments and observations, Galileo overthrew the traditional view of nature represented by Aristotle, which was purely discursive, and initiated modern science based on experimental facts and a rigorous logical system. Therefore, he is called "the father of modern science". His work laid the foundation for the theoretical system of I. Newton.

Biography and Academic Career

Early Years Galileo was born on February 15, 1564, in Pisa, where his father, Fincenzio Galilei, was an expert in the theory of music and acoustics, and was the author of Dialogus Musicalis (Dialogues on Music). 1574 saw the family move to Florence. Galileo was influenced by his father's interest in music, poetry, painting, and mechanics; like his father, he was not superstitious about authority; at the age of 17, he followed his father's order to enter the University of Pisa to study medicine, but he found it boring, and listened to the lectures on Euclidean geometry and Archimedean statics given by the famous scholar O. Ricci, a friend of his family, and found it of great interest outside the classroom. In 1583, Galileo noticed the oscillation of a hanging lamp in a church in Pisa, and then made an analog (single pendulum) experiment with a copper ball suspended by a wire, which proved the isochronous nature of the tiny oscillations and the effect of the pendulum length on the period, and thus created a pulsometer to measure short intervals of time. 1585, due to the poverty of his family, Galileo dropped out of school and worked as a tutor, but he still strived to study on his own, and in 1586 he invented the buoyancy balance, and wrote his treatise, "The Small Balance".

In 1587, he brought his thesis on the calculation of the center of gravity of solids to the University of Rome to meet with Professor C. Clavius, a famous mathematician and calendarist, and was greatly praised and encouraged. Clavius gave him back the lectures on logic and natural philosophy of P. Valla, a professor at the University of Rome, which were very helpful to him in his later work.

In 1588 he gave an academic lecture at the Florentine Academy on the graphic conception of purgatory in A. Dante's Divine Comedy, and his literary and mathematical talents were greatly praised. The following year he published a treatise on several methods of calculating the center of gravity of solids, including several new theorems of statics. As a result of these achievements, he was hired that year to teach geometry and astronomy at the University of Pisa. The following year he discovered the pendulum. At that time, the textbooks of the University of Pisa were written by scholars of the Aristotelian school and were filled with theological and metaphysical dogma. Galileo was discriminated against and ostracized by the Aristotelian school in Pisa because of his often bitter and opposing opinions, and he decided to leave Pisa in 1591 when his father's illness increased the burden on his family. In 1592 Galileo moved to the University of Padua to teach. Padua belonged to the Duchy of Venice, far away from Rome and not under the direct control of the Holy See, and academic thought was relatively free. In this favorable atmosphere, he often participated in various academic and cultural activities inside and outside the university, and debated with colleagues with various ideological views. At this time he drew on his predecessors such as N.F. Tartaglia, G.B. Benedetti, F. Cormendino and other people's mathematical and mechanical research, and often visit factories, workshops, mines and various military and civil engineering, make friends with a wide range of technical staff in various industries, to help them to solve the technical problems, and from this to absorb the knowledge of the production technology and a variety of new experience, and get inspired.

During this period, he deeply and systematically studied the falling body motion, projectile motion, statics, hydraulics, and some civil and military buildings; discovered the principle of inertia, and developed thermometers and telescopes.

In 1597, he received the book "The Mysterious Universe" from J. Kepler, and began to believe in heliocentrism, recognizing that the earth has two kinds of motions: rotation and spin. But by this time he was so impressed by Plato's idea of circular motion as the most natural and perfect that he was not interested in Kepler's theory of elliptical orbits of the planets. 1604 saw a supernova in the sky, with a bright light lasting for 18 months. He took the opportunity to give several scientific lectures in Venice to publicize the Copernican doctrine. The audience grew to more than a thousand because of his brilliant speeches.

July 1609, rumor has it that a Dutch optician invented the telescope for people to enjoy. He did not see the real thing, after thinking about it, with organ pipes and convex-concave lenses each made a telescope, the magnification of 3, and then raised to 9. He invited the Venetian senators to the top of the tower to use the telescope to watch the vista, the viewers are not surprised a lot. The Senate then decided that he was a tenured professor at the University of Padua. 1610 early, he also increased the magnification of the telescope to 33, used to observe the sun, moon and stars, a lot of new discoveries, such as the moon's surface is uneven, the moon and the other planets of the sun's reflection of the light are the moon's light, Mercury has four satellites, the Milky Way is a total of countless luminescence, Saturn has a varied elliptical shape, and so on, opened up a new world of astronomy. This opened up new horizons in astronomy. In March of that year, he published his book "Starry Messenger", which shocked all of Europe. Later, he discovered that Venus varies in size and in its waxing and waning, which was a strong support for the heliocentric theory. Galileo would later look back on the 18 years he spent in Padua as the most productive and refreshing period of his life. Indeed, it was also the period of his life when he achieved the most scholarship.

The fruitfulness of Galileo's research in physics and astronomy during the 20 years of the Tuscan period stimulated him to even greater scholarly endeavors. In order to obtain sufficient time to devote to scientific research, in the spring of 1610, he resigned from the university teaching position, accepting the offer of the Grand Duke of the Duchy of Tuscany, the chief mathematician and philosopher of the court of leisure and the chief professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa honorary position.

Galileo made several trips to Rome in an effort to insulate science from church interference, and in 1611 he made a second trip to Rome with the goal of winning religious, political, and scholarly recognition for his discoveries in astronomy. He was warmly received in Rome by high dignitaries, including Pope Paul V and a number of senior bishops, and was admitted as a member of the Lindsay Institute. The Jesuit priests at the time recognized the facts of his observations, only disagreeing with his interpretations. In May of that year, at a general assembly of the University of Rome, several high-ranking priests publicly proclaimed Galileo's astronomical achievements.

In the same year, he observed sunspots and their motion, and argued that they were on the surface of the sun by comparing the laws of motion of the sunspots with the principle of projection of circular motion; he also discovered that the sun had a rotation. 1613 saw the publication of three pieces of correspondence discussing the sunspot problem. In addition, in 1612, he published a book entitled Dialogues of Floating Bodies in Water.

In 1615, a deceitful group of clergymen and many of those in the church who were hostile to Galileo united to attack Galileo's arguments in defense of the Copernican doctrine, charging him with violating Christian doctrine. Upon hearing of this, he went to Rome for the third time in the winter of that year in an attempt to salvage his reputation, begging the Holy See not to penalize him for maintaining the Copernican viewpoint and not to publicly suppress his propagation of the Copernican doctrine; the Holy See acquiesced in the former request, but rejected the latter. In 1616, Pope Paul V issued the famous "Injunction of 1616," forbidding him to maintain, teach, or defend heliocentrism, either orally or in writing.

In 1624, he went to Rome for the fourth time, hoping that his late friend, the new Pope Urban VIII, would sympathize with and understand his desire to preserve the vitality of the emerging science. He visited Rome six times, trying to show that heliocentrism could be harmonized with Christian doctrine, saying that "the Bible teaches how to enter the kingdom of heaven, not how the heavenly bodies work"; and tried to persuade some of the archbishops in this way, but to no avail. Urbain VIII. insisted on the "ban of 1616"; he was allowed to write a book on both heliocentrism and geocentrism, provided that his attitude to both doctrines was not biased, and that both were written as mathematical hypotheses. During this year of hard work, he developed a microscope that "could magnify a fly as if it were a hen."

In the next six years, he wrote the book Dialogue on the Two World Systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus, and in 1630 he made his fifth trip to Rome to obtain a "license to publish" the book. The book was finally published in 1632. The book was neutral on the surface, but in fact defended the Copernican system, and in many places implicitly ridiculed the pope and bishops, far beyond the scope of the discussion of mathematical assumptions only. The book is written in a witty tone and ranks as a literary masterpiece in the history of Italian literature.

Papal persecution and later life

Six months after the publication of the Dialogues, the Holy See ordered the sale of the book to be halted, arguing that the author's blatant violation of the "ban of 1616" was a serious problem that needed to be scrutinized. It turned out that some people in front of Pope Urban VIII provoked that Galileo in the Dialogue, through the mouth of the simple-minded, old-fashioned Simplicio to the Pope's usual rhetoric, made some ridiculous false statements, so that he was furious. The group that had supported him as pope argued vehemently that Galileo should be severely punished, while the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Spain, believing that Galileo's indulgence would have a significant impact on heretical ideas within their countries, issued a joint warning. Under these internal and external pressures and provocations, the Pope issued a directive in the fall of that year for Galileo to be tried by the Roman Inquisition, despite his old friendship.

Nearly seventy years old and frail Galileo was forced to go to Rome in the winter season with a sick person, and was interrogated three times under the threat of torture, which did not allow him to plead his case. After several tortures, finally on June 22, 1633 in the hall of Santa Maria Nunnery by the 10 cardinals jointly sentenced, the main charge is against the "1616 ban" and biblical doctrine. Galileo was forced to kneel on the cold stone floor and sign a "confession of repentance" that had already been written by the Holy See. The presiding judge declared that Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment, that the Dialogues must be burned, and that the publication or reprinting of his other works was forbidden. The sentence was immediately communicated to the entire Catholic world, and every city with a university was required to read it in public as a warning to all.

Galileo was both a diligent scientist and a devout Catholic, convinced that the scientist's task was to explore the laws of nature and the Church's function was to govern people's souls, and that there should be no encroachment on each other. So he did not want to escape before his trial and did not openly rebel when he was tried, but always obeyed the disposition of the Holy See. He considered it extremely unwise for the Holy See to exercise power outside the theological sphere, but could only be privately dissatisfied. It is clear that the burning at the stake of G. Bruno and the prolonged imprisonment on death row of T. Campanella, two outstanding Italian philosophers, cast a terrible shadow over his spirit. The sentence of the Inquisition was subsequently changed to house arrest, and Archbishop A. Piccolomini, his pupil and late friend, was appointed to watch over him in his private house in Siena, with rules forbidding visitors, and requiring the surrender of all daily writing materials. Under Piccolomini's careful care and encouragement, Galileo regained his vigor and accepted Piccolomini's advice to continue to work on uncontroversial problems of physics. So he still used the three interlocutors in the Dialogues, in the genre of dialogues, and a more simple writing style, his most mature scientific ideas and scientific research results into the Dialogues on the Two New Sciences and Mathematical Proofs of Dialogues. The two new sciences are mechanics of materials (see elastic mechanics) and dynamics. The manuscript was completed in 1636, and since the Church forbade the publication of any of his works, he had to ask a Venetian friend to carry it secretly out of the country, where it was published in Leiden, Holland, in 1638.

Just after Galileo had spent five months at Piccolomini's home, an anonymous letter was written to the Holy See accusing Piccolomini of treating Galileo badly. The Holy See ordered Galileo to move to his own home in Arcetri, near Florence, in December of that year, where he was cared for by his eldest daughter, Virginia, and the ban remained in place. She took good care of her father, but four months later she died before he did.

Galileo's repeated requests for medical treatment were not granted, and in 1637 he lost his sight. The following year he was allowed to live in his son's home. In addition to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he was visited by J. Milton, a famous English poet and political commentator, and P. Gassandi, a French scientist and philosopher. His student and old friend B. Castelli also discussed with him the use of the Jovian satellite to calculate the longitude of the earth. By this time the restrictions and surveillance imposed on him by the Holy See had been significantly relaxed.

In the summer of 1639, Galileo was permitted to accept as his last pupil the bright and studious 18-year-old V. Viviani, who pleased him greatly, and in October 1641 Castelli introduced his own pupil and erstwhile secretary, E. Torricelli, to accompany him. They and the blind old scientist *** with the discussion of how to apply the isochronism of the pendulum to design mechanical clocks, but also discussed the theory of collision, the moon's balance of motion, the height of the water column of the mines under atmospheric pressure, and so on, so that until the end of his life he was still engaged in scientific research.

Galileo died on Jan. 8, 1642, after a long illness, and was buried so hastily and briefly that his bones were not moved to his home cathedral until the next century.

Pioneer of the scientific revolution

Galileo made epoch-making contributions to the emancipation of human thought and the development of civilization. Under the social conditions of his time, he fought persistently for academic freedom from the suppression of power and old traditions, and for the growth of modern science, and made a deafening statement to the world. Therefore, he was a pioneer of the scientific revolution and can be called the "father of modern science". Although he was finally deprived of his personal freedom in his later years, his will to pioneer new science did not waver. His spirit and achievements in the pursuit of scientific truth will always be admired by future generations.

In 1799, Pope J. Paul II of the Vatican, on behalf of the Holy See, publicly vindicated Galileo, saying that the Holy See's persecution of him more than 300 years earlier had been a grave error. This showed that the Holy See finally recognized Galileo's claim - that religion should not interfere with science

Weren't there three points made?

The specific spirit is: 1. to be innovative

2. to defy authority

3. to dedicate oneself to science