Galileo Galilei

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Galileo Galilei On 15 Feb., 1564, in Pisa, Galileo was brought into this world. Little did his parents know he would change how people look at the world. His father, Vincenzo Galilei, studied music and carried out experiments to help him pay for his musical instruments. His mother, Giulia Ammannati, was a good housewife and stayed at home, taking care of the kids. As a child, Galileo was interested in the experiments his father conducted, and often helped him with the experiments. Besides being a famous mathematician and scientist, Galileo also was a pretty good inventor. As soon as he heard of the telescope and how you could see things far in outer space, he put his mind to it and invented a crude model of one. From that, he perfected it and made himself a telescope. After inventing this, he had an idea for a microscope. It was composed of the tube of a telescope, of reduced size, furnished with two lenses. He then distributed this to all his friends, which they thought was amazing. Galileo also invented a thermoscope which recorded the heat of certain liquids. When he grew up, he excelled in the fields of science and math. He then attended college at Pisa, where he later held the chair in mathematics from 1589 - 1592. Later, he was transferred to the University of Padua (the university of the Republic of Venice), where he was appointed to the chair of mathematics until 1610, when he went back to the University of Pisa. There, he studied medicine and astronomy. He stayed there for a year and then in 1611, he went to Rome. He became a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and observed the sunspots. He stayed there and found opposition to one of his theories. While he was studying sunspots, some of the measurements that he got opposed with his theory of the movement of Earth. In 1613 he discovered that, when seen through the telescope, the planet Venus showed phases like those of the Moon, and therefore must orbit the Sun not the Earth. Scientists did not believe Galileo, but Galileo showed a marked tendency to use all his discoveries as evidence for Copernicanism. He seems to have made a lot of enemies by making his opponents look like fools.

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