While reading The Scientific Revolution I read about Galileo Galilei, and I realized he did more than just invent the telescope and discover that the sun was the actual center of the universe. His discovery came from simply watching the sun and other moving objects in the skies above. He didn’t accept that the earth was the center of the universe he followed his curiosity and found something life changing for the entire population.
By publishing his findings he, “profoundly questioned a fundamental Aristotelian distinction between physics of the heavens and that of the Earth” (Shapin 17). Along with the discovery of the Sun being the center of the universe, he also discovered new planets, specifically Jupiter which had its own moons orbiting around it which proves that not everything revolves around the Earth. Also, he noticed black spots on the Sun, and the craters and unsmooth surface of the moon. These discoveries had a huge impact on people because it proved that was once believed to be the heavenly, perfect, universe is just as corrupt as Earth. I found this and many more facts about all of Gaileo’s discoveries at http://www.crystalinks.com/galileo.html.
Galileo also was the first to begin disproving Aristotle’s physics theories by actually testing them out. At one website, the author tells us that Galileo went to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two objects. He discovered that it is due to friction that the two objects pass through is why one falls faster than the other, not because of their densities which is what Aristotle had stated.
The website is: http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/lab/galileo/bio.htm
It’s amazing how huge of an impact Galileo had on changing people’s views of what was right and what was fictional that they had been told. He was one of the first to really challenge religion and Aristotle’s way of thinking. He thought for himself and used experiments to try to figure things out. He didn’t take people’s words for it, he wanted to find out for himself. With all of his discoveries he made people question if anything they were told/taught was really true.
Works Cited:
Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. New York: University of Chicago P, 1998. 16-20.
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