Galileo Galilei was an Italian scientist who was born in 1564 in Pisa, Italy. Galileo lived in an era where scientific knowledge was very minimal and the church has supreme powers. Any scientific discovery had to be in sink with the churches religious beliefs and ancient ideas which was imparted especially ancient Greek philosophers namely Aristotle. During that period, people believed that earth was the centre of the universe and the sun and all the other planets revolved around the earth.

Galileo was one among the first scientists who questioned the ancient ideas and disproved them. As Galileo was a thinker and questioned the narrow-minded thoughts, he was very unpopular among the then religious and scientific community. He was sent to prison several times to forcefully deny his own beliefs.

Galileo adopted methods of observing, questioning and experimenting to refute the ancient ideas. He observed things around him like a falling stone or the planet Venus and questioned as to whether a heavy stone would fall faster than a light stone or why the planet Venus behaves like the Moon etc. Even today scientists adopt the same approach as Galileo did for solving scientific questions and formulate techniques. Due to this, Galileo was termed as ‘the father of modern science’.

Galileo’s Inventions: Galileo was born to Vincenzio Galilei who was a nobleman. The family moved to Florence where Galileo was sent to a monastery to study. This is where Galileo gained his early education and his father wanted him to become a doctor. So Galileo was sent to the University of Pisa to study medicine. Eventhough Galileo’s heart was not for medicine, this is where he really got interested in science. Galileo’s first scientific observation began at the University cathedral where he was watching the lamps being lit. Galileo observed that certain lamps were swinging in wider arcs than the rest. He thought that the wider swings would take a much longer time and started timing the swings against the beat of his pulse. But he discovered that all the swings took a uniform/same time. This made him conduct experiments and very soon he established the laws governing pendulum. Through experiments, he stated that the time of a pendulum swing purely depends on its length. If the time needs to be lengthened, then the length of the pendulum needs to be increased.

After this, Galileo discontinued his studies in medicine and went back to Florence to conduct experiments in mathematics and science and to write about them. In 1589, he joined his old university as a professor of mathematics. He especially became interested in the laws governing moving objects. He discovered that 2 objects with varying weights, falling down had the same speed. The weight of the object did not affect the rate of fall. He even proved this by throwing balls of different sizes from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Since all the old ideas were refuted by Galileo, he became very unpopular and was sent out of the university and he later joined University of Padua.

Here he explored other fields namely, astronomy. In 1608, the 1st crude telescope was discovered in Holland and Galileo on hearing this tried to make one for himself. In 1609, he built his own, with a magnification of x3 which he later improved to x32. He also invented a way to check the curvature of the lenses which greatly improved the telescope. On completion of his telescope, he started studying the heavens and was probably the 1st man known to study the heaven with a telescope. He invented the craters and mountains on the surface of the moon and discovered that the Milky Way consisted of millions of stars. In 1610, he discovered that Jupiter has moons which revolved around it. He also discovered that Venus like Moon went through phases and this could be possible only if the Earth and Venus went around the sun. He strongly supported the ideas of an earlier scientist named Copernicus but the church it. So he returned to Florence and studied magnetism. Being a staunch Catholic, Galileo did not wish to quarrel with the church but as a scientist he explored to seek the truth.

During 1932, Galileo published ‘Dialogue on the two chief systems of the world’ where again he supported Copernicus ideas and was brought to trial and made to deny his own beliefs. Thus Galileo was instrumental in laying down the foundation of modern physics and he died in 1642.