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Galileo Research Paper

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Known for being one of the greatest astronomers in history for his many discoveries of the universe changed are whole views on it. Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, engineer, astronomer, and philosopher who was a key part the scientific revolution during the Renaissance. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and observations that gave support for Copernicanism, for which affected mainly the church. For most think of him as a great man to this day, but at the time he was considered a man of heresy by the church of his ideas. So to ask the question if Galileo was truly a great person or a product of his age you have to look back to how he affected history. For he is now known for many things and for that they can …show more content…
Grassi said that “the comet was a fiery body which had moved along a segment of a great circle at a constant distance from the earth, and since it moved in the sky more slowly than the moon, it must be farther away than the moon.”(Finocchiaro 87) Galileo and Grassi never ended up with a theory of their own on the nature of comets but they did give some estimation that is now known to be wrong. “The Assayer” was Galileo's answer to the Astronomical Balance. Even if they never ended up with a decision there was an even bigger controversy at the time, which was the controversy over heliocentrism. Most of the people believed in the geocentric view, which was that the earth was the center of the universe and that all “heavenly bodies” orbited around the Earth, but Galileo defended heliocentrism, he supported the idea in which the sun does rise and set, and argued a different movement of the earth. In the year 1615 Galileo's writings on heliocentrism had been submitted to the Roman Inquisition, which defended the ideas of Copernicus, but the Inquisition did not like this so, Galileo was later sent to Rome to defend him and Copernican ideas. In 1616, the Inquisition order declared heliocentrism to be "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture."(94). As time went on Pope Urban VIII had asked Galileo to continue writing, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, with …show more content…
We now know that the speed of light is way too fast to be measured by this experiment. Galileo brought upon the public the basic idea of relativity, that “the laws of physics are the same in any system that is moving at a constant speed in a straight line, but not of its speed or direction.”(Hoskin, Michael A 62) While Galileo's statements of mathematics to experimental physics were new, his mathematical methods were the usual ones at the time. Even as there were many other studies he went in and different experiments there were way too many to even put in but as were listed above were the major one’s that later affected future and current people, with their views and their discoveries that effected history

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