Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, the son of a musician. He studied medicine but turned to mathematics and became a professor at Pisa and then at Padua. He studied falling bodies and swinging pendulums, using careful experiments and mathematics to describe motion. In 1609, hearing of a Dutch spyglass, he built his own telescopes and turned them on the sky. He saw mountains on the Moon, countless stars in the Milky Way, four moons circling Jupiter, and the phases of Venus, which he published in The Starry Messenger in 1610. These discoveries convinced him that Copernicus was right that the Earth moves around the Sun. In 1616 Church authorities ordered him not to defend that view. His Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems of 1632 seemed to mock the pope's position, and in 1633 he was tried by the Inquisition, forced to recant, and kept under house arrest for the rest of his life. There, though going blind, he wrote Two New Sciences, his greatest work on motion. He died in 1642.

Galileo Galilei is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: His advocacy of Copernicanism led to his condemnation by the Catholic Inquisition. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy