Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei, who was the son of a musician and music theorist, was born near Pisa, Italy on February 18, 1564.   When he turned 17-years-old Galileo registered at the university in central Italy to study medicine.   He never became a physician because he became captivated by mathematics.   The logic behind mathematics impressed him so much that he began applying it to the way things move and fall.   He began this study of motion in his own way.   His teachers studied science only in books and the scholars of his time who studied it from nature all stopped at the observation of natural phenomena.   Instead, Galileo invented experiments to prove natural phenomena and the conclusions of his experiments with mathematics (Fermi 3-5).   Throughout his life Galileo discovered or proved many concepts that are still used today
One day while watching the hanging lamps in the Cathedral of Pisa Galileo saw one lamp swinging and observed a rhythm in the swings of the lamp.   He noticed that the lamp always took the same time to go from one end of its swing to the other, even though the width of the swings decreased.   Wanting more proof Galileo tied two small balls to two strings of exactly the same length.   He swung one ball a certain distance from its rest position and the other one from a different distance.   He watched the balls and counted the number of oscillations.   He then found that both pendulums made the same number of oscillations in the same time.   Even balls of different weights oscillated together, given that the strings were the same length.   Galileo had discovered the law of isochronisms of small oscillations (Fermi 13-16).
After studying pendulums Galileo then began research into the idea of motion.   He first disproved Aristotle’s idea that bodies that are different weights fall at different speeds.   At the University of Padua he continued his research and proved that falling objects speed up or slow down equally with time while falling.   He...