How Did Galileo Contribute To Science

Encourage to enter medicine by his father, Galileo found home in mathematics. His excitement for science lead him to be an activist, acting and leading the way through science. Galileo’s work is best understood because of his literature. He wrote his ideas, thoughts, humor, and seriousness so well that any writing found has helped us get into his mind and follow his procedures. His notable work are in the form of letters and books. His discoveries of motion were outlined in De Motu. He wrote a letter to Antonio de’ Medici on the January 7, 1610 on excitement of the first, to his knowledge, to observe the heavens; in that same year he published Sidereus Nuncius which included detailed observations and innovative astronomical information (Gibson,
1964). In continuation of his observations of the solar system he wrote six letters on solar spots on the sun. These letters refuted those in support of the Earth centered system and outlined his firm stance of the Copernican system (Gibson, 1964). With the awaken sense of his disagreement of the current understanding of the universe he spoke out in the publication of 1630 A Dialogue on the Two World Systems and 1636 Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences.
Galileo was a professor of nature; the way things worked intrigued him.
His understandings of nature become the foundation that succeeding generations built modern science on (Gibson, 1964). Galileo was born into an environment of wealthy appreciated by funding genius ides. This environment allowed Galileo to find his full scope (Gibson, 1964). He excelled in the arts of painting and music. This ministered his recordings of observations and popularity in the early 1600s. Galileo was educated in the monastery of Vallombrosa near Florence; here he gained proficient skills in Greek and logic as well as working with some of the best Latin authors (Gibson, 1964). This background gives insight to his elegance of writings and religious
following.
Galileo has a full history. He began to lecture at the age of twenty-three in 1588; however, by this time he had already published three papers. One of his invention of the hydrostatic balance, one on the properties of the cycloid, and one on the center of gravity of solid (Gibson, 1964). In 1592 he was appointed chair of mathematics at Padua. Galileo was able to continue his accomplishments at Padua but with some difficulty due to his demand on teaching. He was able to lay the groundwork for his mathematical theories of motion, experiments in mechanics, gained European fame as a lecturer in a variety of subjects, “…drew the important distinction between temperature and heat, invented a rudimentary thermometer (thermoscope), and finally brought about the crucial event in the history of science-the improvement of the telescope and its use in exploring the heavens” (Gibson, 1964, pg. 1272). In 1610 he left Padua for a life tenure at the University of Florence, within a year however, he had left to visit Rome where he found fame, admiration, and esteem of the pope and princes of the church and state due to his telescoping discoveries (Gibson, 1964). During a time of funded genius, Galileo wrote to the newly appointed Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo de Medici II. He had pledged his allegiance by declaring he named the four stars of Jupiter after him, the Medicean Stars (Gingerich & Helden, 2011). He also gifted him with a telescope and said he would arrive to show him how it works. This pledge earned him the role of court mathematician and philosopher which opened up time for him to continue his research (Gingerich & Helden, 2011).
Galileo perused his career in terms that would benefit him. He worked long terms with low pay to gain his patronage trust. Once his guaranteed terms of teaching had expired his dedication to the state earned him more time for a paying employment. When he had expired his favors and was told he must work in addition to his patronage to earn a higher salary he sought to work for one sponsorship with deep pockets. However, he needed to come up with something that would bring his name back to the lips of those of importance, and luckily for him he heard about the spyglass that he altered into his telescope. He was offered money he had sought for to build telescopes for the Navy and state. It was following these affairs that his discoveries of the solar system were made.
Galileo’s Telescope
Galileo improved on a Dutch design of the telescope, crafting his own lenses he was able to magnify multiple times that of the original design.
His advanced instrument allowed him to view things no one before him had seen (Westfall, 1985). Using the newly improved telescope he discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons, the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, and the irregular moon (Galileo, 2010). He took his eye to the heavens because he wanted to provide evidence of interpretation of the Bible. However, his sightings did not agree with the current Church view; instead he found evidence to support the Copernicus’ argument for a heliocentric universe. For example, the moon that Galileo observed was not smooth and unblemished, a traditional view in relation to the purity of Virgin Mary (Harris, 2010). Galileo’s moon showed mountains, craters, and it was irregular. To the Church that suggested impurity. We know what he saw because he used his talent of art and knowledge of perspective to make a watercolor of the moon using secondary lighting techniques. One of the best known of Galileo’s drawings are the waxing first quarter on December 3, 1609 (Harris, 2010). The moon is detailed with shaded craters, a vivid darkness on the left and lightness on the right.
Galileo’s journey of the solar system began in 1609 when he heard of a magnifying spyglass invented by Lippershey (Gibson, 1964). The instrument, more of a toy, appeared in Venice as a device that allowed the viewing of distant
items by magnification. Using principles of refraction and his understanding of mechanics he made a three-power magnification telescope, eventually arriving at a thirty-two powered telescope (Gibson, 1964, p. 1272). He quickly advanced his own telescope from there. By late August Galileo was able to magnify eight or nine times (Westfall, 1985).
He reviewed his observation of Earth’s Moon in August of 1610. He observed the phases of the moon before allowing Cosimo de Medici II to look into the sky. An agreement he had made in exchange for more time for research. Before Earth’s moon he had viewed the Jupiter system. In January of 1610 Galileo had made a series of observations around Jupiter. It had showed four bright stars that kept his focus. At first he only saw three stars and notated their changing positions each night of his observations. On January 13, 1610 was when he viewed all four moons. It was then that he made the connection that by their changing positions and proximity to Jupiter that they are moons and not stars (Gingerich & Helden, 2011). Reading his original notes on this night there is a clear stance when he changes his language from Italian to Latin, as Latin is the language of science. Also to follow by his observation of the new satellites were the naming of them. This was a big discovery and many people wanted to dictate their names for it will last into the heavens and not be stapled to Earth. This discovery was evidence of the Copernican system. Aristotelian and Ptolemaic held traditional views of a geocentric universe. The sun, moon, and planets revolved around Earth. Galileo’s discoveries of Jupiter’s moons challenged this view. They agreed more with Nicolaus Copernicus who proposed the Earth rotated around the sun in 1543 (Harris, 2010). Telescope was not the original name of Galileo’s invention. It was given that name by a Greek member in the Lyncean Academy where Galileo was selected as a member. In 1611 he presented his spyglass to the religious hierarchy in Rome. After some of the Jesuits confirmed his sightings he was graciously received (Harris, 2010). Galileo set the first foundation for planetary exploration. “for 350 years after Galileo’s discoveries, ground-based telescopes and theoretical modeling furnished everything we knew about the Sun’s planetary retinue” (Burns, 2010, n.p.).
Thermoscope to Thermometer
Galileo founded the principle that the density of a liquid changed in proportion to its temperature (Williams, 2015). Using this knowledge he built on the idea of the thermoscope. During the sixteenth century a formal means of measuring heat and temperature did not exists. A thermoscope played on the idea that air expanded with heat and contracted with cold. Galileo’s attempt at the thermoscope was done to rectify his place with the Venetian intelligentsia (Williams, 2015). He constructed a device that worked on the principle of the expansion and contraction of air in a bulb moved water in a tube (Williams, 2015). His construction was a major breakthrough of the time. It provided meteorological information on a quantitative level (Williams, 2015). It is debated on when and whom to give credit to for the advanced in thermoscope. In other parts of Europe a similar instrument as Galileo’s was created by inventors Cornelis Drebbel and Robert Fludd (Helden, 1995). In 1638 Benedetto Castelli who studied under Galileo had written about an instrument he had seen with Galileo around 1603:
He took a small glass flask, about as large as a small hen's egg, with a neck about two spans long [perhaps 16 inches] and as fine as a wheat straw, and warmed the flask well in his hands, then turned its mouth upside down into the a vessel placed underneath, in which there was a little water. When he took away the heat of his hands from the flask, the water at once began to rise in the neck, and mounted to more than a span above the level of the water in the vessel. The same Sig. Galileo had then made use of this effect in order to construct an instrument for examining the degrees of heat and cold. (Helden, 1995).
This explanation gives recognition to Galileo because Drebbel and Fludd had not started their experimentation until much after 1603. Years following Galileo’s thermoscope a numerical scale was created with the help of others, including the eighteenth century developments of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius.
Pendulum Clock
During the sixteenth century Aristotelian physics, those schooled with the philosophy of Greek period relating to Aristotle, believed that heavy objects would return to a place of rest, and thus fall faster through a medium than lighter objects (Helden, 1995). Using that theory, a heavy object suspended by rope would find its resting place in the center. Galileo, however, had previously demonstrated by experiments that lighter objects do not fall slower than heavier ones and in addition “demonstrated that objects thrown into the air travel in parabolic arcs” (Williams, 2015). He often questioned Aristotelian approaches to physics. The parabolic arc is a curve in the shape of a path that sways back and forth. In 1588 Galileo began to research pendulums due to his fascination of forward-backward motion of a suspended weight (Williams, 2015). The legend says his fascination with the pendulum came from him watching a suspended lamp swing in the cathedral of Pisa (Helden, 1995). In 1602 he found that the time it took for the object to swing was not in relation to the weight, but the length of the pendulum. Galileo had proven the principle of isochronism. The pendulum clock would be one of his last discoveries, and something he worked on for a long period of time. His clock was able to tell time down to seconds but he had become blind and was under house arrest for his beliefs in a Sun centered solar system. His death came in 1642.