The scientific revolution of the Renaissance had its start with Copernican heliocentrism and its culmination, a century later, with Newtonian mechanics. His most eminent representative, however, was the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei. In the field of physics, Galileo made the first laws of motion; in the astronomy department, he confirmed the Copernican theory with his telescopic observations. But none of these valuable contributions have had such significant consequences as the introduction of the experimental methodology, an achievement that earned him the title of father of modern science.
Moreover, the inquisitorial process he underwent for defending the heliocentric theory would eventually pull him up into a symbol status: the blunder committed by the ecclesiastical authorities wanted to see the final break between science and religion and despite the outcome of the process, the triumph of reason over the medieval obscurantism. Similarly, the famous phrase attributed to him after the forced withdrawal (Eppur if muove, ‘And yet, the earth moves’) has become the emblem of the overwhelming power of truth against any form of established dogmatism. Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15th 1564.
There is barely any information on his mother except for a couple of letters found meant to Giulia Ammannati di Pescia. This letters don’t hold her responsible for flattering figure. His father, Vincenzo Galilei, was a Florentine and came from a family that had long ago been illustrious. With a musician vocation, economic difficulties had forced him to engage in trade. This profession led him to settle in Pisa. Man of broad humanistic culture, was an accomplished performer and a composer and music theorist; his works on music theory enjoyed some fame at the time.
Galileo not only had to inherit his father’s taste in music (playing the lute), but also his independent character and fighting spirit, and even disregard for the blind trust in authority and the wish to combine theory with the practice. Galileo was the eldest of seven children of which three (Virginia, Michelangelo and Livia) end up contributing, over time, to increase his economic problem 1574 the family moved to Florence, and Galileo was sent away to the monastery of Santa Maria di Vallombrosa, as a student or perhaps as a novice.
In 1581 Galileo entered the University of Pisa, where he enrolled as a medical student at the wish | as a medical student at the wish of his father. Four years later, however, he left the university without obtaining a degree, but with a good knowledge of Aristotle. Meanwhile, there had been a determining factor in his life: his initiation into mathematics (apart from college) and the consequent loss of interest in his career as a doctor.
Back in Florence in 1585, Galileo spent several years devoted to the study of mathematics, but also interested in philosophy and literature, which showed their preferences for Ariosto against Tasso; from that time dates his first work on the centroid of the bodies (later recover in 1638, as an appendix which would be his main scientific work) and the invention of a hydrostatic balance to determine specific weights, two contributions located in the line of Archimedes , who Galileo would not hesitate to describe as a “superhuman”.
After giving some private lessons in mathematics in Florence and Siena, he tried to get a regular job at the universities of Bologna, Padua and Florence itself. In 1589 he finally got a job in the study of Pisa, where dissatisfaction with the salary received, could not help but become apparent in a satirical poem against academic dress. In Pisa Galileo wrote a text on movement which remained unpublished, in which, even within the framework of medieval mechanics, criticized the Aristotelian explanation of falling bodies and projectile motion.
In continuity with that criticism, some historiographical tradition has forged the story (now generally regarded as unlikely) Galileo refuting Aristotle materially by the process of launching various weights from the top of the Campanile of Pisa, to the disgruntled looks peripatetic. Nearly two thousand years ago, Aristotle had argued that heavier bodies fall faster; According to this legend, Galileo would have demonstrated the falsity of this concept with the simple process of leaving simultaneously bodies of different weights fall from the top of the tower and find that all reach the floor simultaneously.
If true, it could be dated to the episode of the Tower of Pisa the birth of modern scientific methodology. And, in times of Galileo, science was essentially speculative. The ideas and theories of the great sages of antiquity and the Fathers of the Church, and any concept mentioned in the Scriptures, they were revered as indisputable and immutable truths that could add little more than glosses and commentaries, or abstract Speculation that did not alter its substance.
Aristotle, for example, had distinguished between natural movements (the stones fall to the ground because it is their natural place, and smoke, being hot, ascends to the Sun) and violent (like an arrow shot into the sky, which is not natural) place; scholars of Galileo’s time were devoted to reason about as sterile as it classifications, seeking a useless conceptual refinement.
Instead, Galileo started observing the facts, subjecting them to controlled experiments and measurable conditions. It is probably true that leave weights fall from the tower of Pisa; but it is quite true that built a sloping six meters long (smoothing to reduce friction) and a water clock with which measured the rate of descent of the balls.
Hypothesis arose from the observation that had corroborated in new experiments and mathematically formulated as universally valid laws because, according to a celebrated his concept, “the Book of Nature is written in mathematical language. ” With this approach, natural today and in this new and shocking time (for questioning thoughts universally accepted and the authority of the sages and doctors), Galileo inaugurated the methodological revolution that has earned him the title “father of modern science”.