Difference between revisions of "Galileo"
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Revision as of 05:08, April 11, 2007
1564-1642 Italian physicist and astronomer who improved the telescope and was prosecuted for publishing certain heliocentric ideas.
In June or July of 1609, word reached Galileo the telescope, which had been invented in Holland. Without knowing the technical details of the construction of the device, he managed to create one for himself. With it, he was able to witness a supernova, observe our moon, and document the phases of Venus. He also located sunspots. These discoveries helped support a heliocentric system.
The Catholic Church decided against Galileo in 1616 and said that 1) the immobility of the Sun at the center of the universe was absurd in philosophy and formally heretical, and that 2) the mobility of Earth was absurd in philosophy and at least erroneous in theology.[1]
However, by 1741 the Church under Pope Benedict XIV bid the Holy Office grant an imprimatur to the first edition of the Complete Works of Galileo.[2]
Stillman Drake of the University of Toronto [1] was for the last decades of his life the most original and important scholar to study this seventeenth-century physicist.[3]