![]() ![]() Leaving the university, he kept himself by teaching privately and lecturing, and then produced his first scientific paper at the age of 22. Later on Galileo utilised the phenomenon to make his pulsilogium, a device timing the human pulse, and on his deathbed 70 years later he designed a pendulum-regulated escapement for a proposed clock. He timed the swinging of chandeliers in the cathedral and at once abstracted the essence of the problem, so that he made pendulums of string and small weights and established the relationship between length and time of swing, using his own pulse for measurement, for there existed no device for fine accurate timing. His mind was alerted to the excitement and importance of mathematics applied to practical problems, that is in effect, physics. Archimedes became “that divine man” and Galileo saw in Euclid the wonder of geometry, especially in the work on ratios, which Galileo was to expand and use to its limit later. Meeting Ricci later, Galileo also learned about Archimedes, a Latin version of whose work had been published in 1543. Galileo came upon Ricci teaching the young pages about Euclid and was at once entranced. The court mathematician, Matteo Ricci, went with it. However, the biting winter winds of Florence at that time forced the court to relocate to Pisa. Galileo was to read medicine and so be able to earn a living. Vincenzio Galilei, his father, was also a musician, with original views, as well as being something of a mathematician. He was highly cultured and came of a family of minor nobility. He wrote poetry and was a skilled musician and painter. It had its famous university at Padua (from which, it may be remembered, the learned doctor Bellario was to come to defend Antonio against Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, which William Shakespeare wrote in 1594, when Galileo was at Padua).Īs a young student at Pisa, Galileo was highly intelligent, observant and questioning, a joy to the first-class teacher and a pest to the second rate, who as usual formed the majority. It expelled the Jesuits and defied the Pope. It refused to give in to the authority of Rome and the Church. Next to Tuscany was the state led by Venice – the Venetian Republic – as near as anyone came to a democracy in the 16th century. The one in which Galileo was born was an autocracy, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, with its capital at Florence and the second city at Pisa, his birthplace. It was divided into small states often warring with one another. Italy, for instance, was no longer the great Roman Empire. We must understand, however briefly, the sociological, political and religious climates of Galileo’s time. Yet it is Galileo’s name that survives as the “founder” of physics. More or less contemporary with him were physicists and mathematicians Willebrord Snell (the Dutchman who conceived the law of light refraction), the Belgian Simon Stevin and the four Frenchmen Marin Mersenne, Pierre de Fermat, Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascale. Galileo was part of the Renaissance, the centuries-long ferment accelerated and intensified by the invention of printing in the middle of the 15th century. Galileo lived at a time when the centuries-old Almagest of the Egyptian scholar Claudius Ptolemy, written in 139AD, was still being used by the Church as “evidence” and “confirmation” for the Aristotelian idea that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe. A cultural adventure across Renaissance Italy: Explore Florence and Bolgna on a New Scientist Discovery Tour Galileo and the Renaissance ![]()
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