Galileo’s Early Years and Education

Galileo’s Early Years and Education
Galileo Galilei was born in the Italian city of Pisa on February 15, 1564. He was the eldest son of Vincenzo Galilei and Giulia Ammannati.
His father was a well-known composer, who played the lute, a stringed instrument.
Galileo himself also became a skilled lute player.
As a young man, Galileo was torn between training to become a catholic priest or a doctor of medicine. His father encouraged him to study medicine, and Galileo took his father’s advice, starting a medical course at the University of Pisa when he was 17 years old. Soon, however, his father’s plans came unstuck.Math, Music, Physics and Art
Aged 18, Galileo stumbled into a mathematics lecture, changing his life, and the course of scientific history. Mathematics seemed so much more interesting than medicine, he thought, and it also seemed to play a crucial role in understanding and explaining our world.
Galileo had recently become fascinated by the movement of pendulums, noting that if the length of the string was constant, it didn’t matter how hard you swung it, the pendulum always moved to-and-fro at the same rate.
The musician in him recognized a principle similar to his lute. It didn’t matter how hard you hit a lute string, it would always play the same note: but if you changed the length of the string you could you change the musical note. And likewise a pendulum would change the rate at which it swung to and fro only if you changed the length of the string.
As an accomplished musician, Galileo knew that the relationship between string length and the note it produced was mathematical – this had been proved almost 2000 years earlier by the Pythagoreans
 in Ancient Greece.
In fact, Galileo’s father had contributed to the field of the mathematics of music by discovering a new relationship, showing that in a stringed instrument, the pitch of a musical note depends on the square root of the string’s tension.
And so the die was cast. Galileo realized that he was much more interested in mathematics and physics than he was in medicine. He chose to follow the path which excited him most intellectually rather than that which would have rewarded him most financially.
Having strayed from medicine, he then decided that he might as well study art and drawing in addition to science.
Funnily enough, he never completed his university degree!
Galileo Math Music Physics
Galileo believed that mathematics is the language of the world around us: whether it is the behavior of planets and pendulums, or the fundamentals of music and mechanics – all could be understood using mathematics.Galileo’s Scientific Career
At the age of 22, Galileo published a book about a hydrostatic balance he had invented. In this way his name became known to other scientists.
Despite his scientific progress, Galileo’s first job was as an art teacher. Aged 24, he began teaching art in the Italian city of Florence. He didn’t stay long in this job; his scientific and mathematical powers had been noticed, and in 1589, aged just 25, he was awarded the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Pisa.
He worked in Pisa for three years, before moving to the University of Padua in northern Italy in 1592.
Galileo settled in Padua, where he taught mathematics, physics and astronomy, and made many momentous scientific discoveries.Galileo’s Scientific Achievements and Discoveries
Galileo:
* Was the first person to study the sky with a telescope.
* Became a skilled telescope builder and made money selling them to merchants in Venice who were eager to see which ships were arriving as soon as possible in an effort to make money on the ‘futures’ market.
* Discovered the first moons ever known to orbit a planet other than Earth. Jupiter’s four largest moons, which he discovered: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, are together known as the Galilean Satellites in his honor.
* Discovered that Venus has phases like the moon, ranging from a thin crescent to full.
* Discovered the rings of Saturn, although he found their appearance very confusing.
* Discovered our moon has mountains.
* Discovered that the Milky Way is made up of stars.Galileo Milky Way
On a dark, clear night, you can see the Milky Way in the sky. This NASA image contains much more detail than you could ever see with the naked eye. Galileo discovered that the Milky Way is made up of stars.
* Was, we now know from drawings in his notebook, the first person ever to see the planet Neptune. He observed that, unlike the other stars, it was moving. In Galileo’s time, the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn had been known of for thousands of years and no others were contemplated. Galileo lost track of the moving star he had found. Neptune was not discovered until 1846.
* Established that, if there is no air resistance, everything falls to the ground at the same rate regardless of its weight. Gravity accelerates all objects equally, whatever their mass.
* Established that when gravity accelerates any object, the object accelerates at a constant rate so that the distance fallen is proportional to the time squared. For example, a ball falling for one second would travel a distance of one unit; a ball falling for two seconds would travel a distance of four units; a ball falling for three seconds would travel a distance of nine units, etc. It is probably a myth that he discovered this by dropping cannon balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He used balls rolling down wooden ramps for most of his investigations of gravity and acceleration.
* Identified that anything thrown or fired on Earth, such as a rock or a cannonball, flies along a curved path and that the shape of the curve is a parabola.Galileo Pisa Gravity
Galileo investigated the effect of gravity on falling bodies. He found balls fired from cannons followed a path shaped like a parabola and that all bodies fall to Earth with a constant acceleration.
* Stated the principle of inertia: a body moving on a level surface will continue in the same direction at a constant speed unless disturbed. This later became Newton’s First Law of Motion.
* Proposed the first theory of relativity: that the laws of physics are the same for all observers moving in a straight line at constant speed.
* Discovered that for pendulums, their period of oscillation squared is directly proportional to their length and is independent of the mass attached to the string or rod. Galileo realized pendulums could be used to keep time, but never seems to have put this into practice, other than showing his son a design for a clock. Clocks had not been invented in Galileo’s time and his experiments were conducted using his pulse as the timekeeper, or, better, the weight of water which escaped through a hole in a vessel.
* Tried to measure the speed of light, but found it was too fast for him to measure.
* Showed that the set of perfect squares 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100… has as many members in it as the set of whole numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 9, 10… even though, at first sight, the set of whole numbers appears to contain more members. This demonstration became known as Galileo’s Paradox. The basis of Galileo’s proof is that there must be as many whole numbers squared as there are whole numbers, because every whole number can be squared – so every whole number can be paired up with its square.