Julia's+Project

I am doing Galileo Galilei. Julia, it looks like you're off to a good start. Refer back to the rubric to make sure you have all the required items. - Mr. Burns


 * __GALILEO GA__ **[[image:http://galileo.rice.edu/images/people/galileo/g_passignani.gif width="291" height="210" align="left" caption="Galileo Portrait by Passignani" link="http://galileo.rice.edu/por/galileo.html"]]** __LILEI__ **

(Wilde, Megan).
 * Born: In [|Pisa,] [|Italy] on February 15,1564.
 * Died: January 8th 1642 (age 77) in Arcetri (near Florence) (now in Italy)
 * Nationality: Italian
 * Fields: Astronomy, Physics and Mathematics
 * Known for: Telescopic observational astronomy

His father, Vincenzo Galilei, belonged to a noble [|family] of straitened fortune, and had gained some distinction as a musician and mathematician. The boy at an early age manifested his aptitude for mathematical and mechanical pursuits, but his [|parents], wishing to turn him aside from studies which promised no substantial return, destined him for the [|medical profession]. But all was in vain, and at an early age the youth had to be left to follow the bent of his native genius, which speedily placed him in the very first rank of [|natural philosophers]. (Knight, Kevin).

After four years, Galileo had announced to his father that he wanted to be a monk. This was not exactly what father had in mind, so Galileo was hastily withdrawn from the monastery. In 1581, at the age of 17, he entered the University of Pisa to study medicine, as his father wished. (The New York Times Company).

To earn a living, Galileo Galilei started tutoring students in mathematics. He did some experimenting with floating objects, developing a balance that could tell him that a piece of, say, gold was 19.3 times heavier than the same volume of water. He also started campaigning for his life's ambition: a position on the mathematics faculty at a major university. Although Galileo was clearly brilliant, he had offended many people in the field, who would choose other candidates for vacancies. (The New York Times Company).

After Galileo had completed work on the //Discourses// it was smuggled out of Italy, and taken to Leyden in Holland where it was published. It was his most rigorous mathematical work which treated problems on impetus, moments, and centres of gravity. Much of this work went back to the unpublished ideas in //De Motu// from around 1590 and the improvements which he had worked out during 1602-1604. In the //Discourses// he developed his ideas of the inclined plane writing:

//-I assume that the speed acquired by the same movable object over different inclinations of the plane are equal whenever the heights of those planes are equal.//

He then described an experiment using a pendulum to verify his property of inclined planes and used these ideas to give a theorem on acceleration of bodies in free fall:

//-The time in which a certain distance is traversed by an object moving under uniform acceleration from rest is equal to the time in which the same distance would be traversed by the same movable object moving at a uniform speed of one half the maximum and final speed of the previous uniformly accelerated motion.//

After giving further results of this type he gives his famous result that the distance that a body moves from rest under uniform acceleration is proportional to the square of the time taken. (University of St Andrews, Scotland).



//“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”//- GALILEO GALILEI

As a professor of astronomy at University of Pisa, Galileo was required to teach the accepted theory of his time that the sun and all the planets revolved around the Earth. Later at University of Padua he was exposed to a new theory, proposed by **[|Nicolaus Copernicus]**, that the Earth and all the other planets revolved around the sun. Galileo's observations with his new telescope convinced him of the truth of Copernicus's sun-centered or heliocentric theory.



Galileo became blind at the age of 72. His blindness has often been attributed to damage done to his eyes by telescopic observations he made of the Sun in 1613. The truth is he was blinded by a combination of cataracts and glaucoma. Galileo died at Arcetri in 1642—the year Isaac Newton was born. (Chew, Robin).