Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) is one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the
history of science. He was appointed professor of mathematics at the ...
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Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) is one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the
history of science. He was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa in 1589, and in
1592 he moved to the University of Padua where he taught for the next eighteen years. In 1610 he
published a number of sensational telescopic discoveries, including that the lunar landscape is like
that of a barren earth, and his book, the
Sidereal Message, sold out in less than a
week. The next year he was awarded the prestigious position of personal mathematician and philosopher to
the Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence. He next found that there are dark spots on the face of the sun
and that gave rise to a lively international controversy that is recorded in his
Letters on the
Sunspots. He argued for a non-literal interpretation of the Bible, and he became involved
in a dispute over the nature of comets with a Jesuit professor whom he lampooned in a witty essay,
The Assayer. When the Roman Inquisition banned the Copernican theory in 1616, he
refrained from writing about the motion of the Earth until a Florentine friend became Pope Urban VIII in
1623. His
Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, which is not only a scientific
masterpiece but an outstanding literary work, appeared in 1632. Summoned to Rome he was put on trial and
condemned to house arrest in 1633. He nonetheless went on to write his
Discourse on Two New
Sciences, the work for which he is remembered as the forerunner of Newton. He died in
Florence in 1642.
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