Galileo’s Top Contributions to Astronomy
Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei gave out various scientific insights that laid the basis for the upcoming scientists. His examination of the laws of motion and enhancements on the telescope further assisted the comprehension of the world and universe around him. Both the understanding led him to question the current belief of the time.
The Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, enlightened the idea that heavier objects fall faster in comparison to the lighter ones, a belief which is still cloaked in Galileo’s lifetime. But Galileo was not satisfied. Testing with balls of different sizes and weights, he rolled them down ramps using different propensities. His tests shown the outcome that all of the balls braged the similar speeding up independent of their mass. He also exhibited that objects thrown in the air proceeding along with a parabola.
Simultaneously, Galileo worked with pendulums. In his life, punctuality was virtually nonexistent. Galileo saw, however, that the stable motion of a pendulum could enhance this. In the year 1602, Galilio found out that the time it taken by a pendulum to swing back and forth is not based on the arc of the swing. Galileo, near the end of his lifetime, created the first pendulum clock.
Galileo’s Telescope
Galileo is often credited with the formation of a telescope. Hans Lippershey registered for the first patent in the year 1608. However others may have beaten him to the actual invention. Rather, he remarkably enhanced upon them. In the year 1609, he first acknowledged of the existence of the spyglass, which encouraged him. He began to test with telescope-making, going so far as to pulverize and polish his own lenses. His telescope permitted him to see with an amplification of eight or nine times. When compared, spyglasses of the day only gave an amplification of three.
It was not long before Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens. He was the first one to observe craters on the moon, found out the sunspots, and followed the phases of Venus. The rings of Saturn confused him, emerging as lobes and disappearing when they were on-edge.
Of all of his telescope discoveries, he is perhaps most famous for his discovery of the four extremely massive moons of Jupiter, now termed as the Galilean moons, namely, Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto. When NASA dispatched a mission to Jupiter in the 1990s, it was known Galileo in honour of the famed astronomer.
Galileo have also created the first recorded studies of the planet Neptune, though he could not acknowledge it as a planet. While noticing Jupiter’s moons in the year 1612 and 1613, he observed a nearby star whose position was not found in any modern record.
It has been known for many decades that this mysterious star was actually the planet Neptune. Computer simulations exhibit the accuracy of his observations disclosing that Neptune would have looked just like a faint star from where Galileo saw it.
Copernican system
In Galileo’s lifetime, all celestial bodies were known to orbit the Earth. Galileo’s research comprising of his investigations of the phases of Venus and the fact that Jupiter bragged moons which did not orbit around Earth, held the Copernican system, which accomplished in accurately stating that the Earth and other planets orbit around the sun. In the year 1616, Galileo was called upon to Rome and was even warned not to teach or write about this controversial theory. However, in the year 1632, believing that he could write on the subject if he treated it as a mathematical proposition, he published his work on the Copernican system.
Hydrostatic Balance
He was captivated with the subject mathematics and decided to make both the subjects of mathematics and philosophy his profession. During this period he built a new form of hydrostatic balance for measuring small quantities and even wrote a short dissertation, “The Little Balance”, which circulated in manuscript form. He also began his studies on motion, which he pursued regularly for the next two decades.
In the year 1588, Galileo also discovered some ingenious theorems on centres of gravity and this was able to bring him recognition among mathematicians and the patronage of Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–1607), a nobleman and author of several important works on mechanics. As a result of which, he attained the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa in 1589.
Earth’s Orbit
Shortly after the telescope was originated in the Netherlands, Galileo designed his own from makeshift spectacle lenses. He learned how to create an progressively remarkable telescope, which he at last made use of with a motive to observe the solar phases of the planet Venus. After observing Venus went through similar phases to the moon, he came to the conclusion that the sun must be the central point of the solar system, not the Earth as was thought before.
The Principle of the Pendulum
At just 20 years of age, Galileo was in a grand cathedral and saw that a lamp oscillating up above took almost the same period of time for each swing, even as the distance of a swing got increasingly potent. This principle of the pendulum made Galileo popular, and was at last used to regulate clocks. Therefore, the principle of the pendulum demonstrated that a pendulum will always take the same amount of time to finish a swing as there is always the same amount of kinetic energy in the pendulum. It is rarely transported from one direction to the other.
The Law of Falling Bodies
When reckoning for comparatively tiny differences in aerodynamics and weather conditions, the law of falling bodies exhibits that all objects will fall at an equal rate. Galileo also showed that this theory by climbing to the top of the leaning tower of Pisa and dropping objects of different weight off the side. All the falling objects hit the ground at the same time. Opposite to the conventional notion build by Aristotle, the speed of a heavy object’s fall was found to not be proportional to its weight. Therefore, as per his first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703), Galileo exhibited, by dropping bodies of different weights from the top of the popular Leaning Tower, that the speed recorded when a heavy object falls down is not proportional to its weight, as Aristotle had claimed.
Astrological Discoveries
Galileo made various astronomical discoveries which people in today’s scenario consider it as common sense. He discovered that the surface area of the moon is rough and uneven in contrary to the smooth as people had assumed. And in the year 1610, he found four moons circling around Jupiter. More importantly, than either of these was his finding that many more stars live than are visible to the eye, an assumption that came as a shocking surprise to the scientific community at that point of time.
Mathematical Paradigm of Natural Law
For decades, natural philosophy, which at that time enclosed such fields like physics and astronomy, was debated, discussed and theorized from a qualitative standpoint. Galileo didn’t just find out specific laws of the universe, but he also improved the qualitative standpoint and build mathematics as the language of scientific invention. He spearheaded the scientific method. He also assisted in the modern practice of examination and measured the laws of nature. His doing so resulted in the disclosure that various laws of Greek philosophers like that of Plato and Aristotle were inaccurate.
