Thinker · TH-0526
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer, physicist and mathematician who taught at Pisa and Padua and later served the Medici court in Florence. His…
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer, physicist and mathematician who taught at Pisa and Padua and later served the Medici court in Florence. His telescope observations of Jupiter's moons and the phases of Venus, and his studies of falling bodies, made him a central figure of the Scientific Revolution. He argued that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. His Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) defended the Copernican view that the Earth moves around the Sun. The Inquisition condemned him in 1633, and he spent his last years under house arrest near Florence.
Key ideas
- The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, and natural philosophy must use it.
- Questions about nature should be settled by observation, experiment and reasoning, not by the authority of Aristotle or tradition.
- Uniform motion cannot be detected from within a moving system, so the Earth can move without our feeling it.
- Shape, number and motion belong to bodies themselves, while colours, tastes and smells exist only in the perceiver.
- Scripture teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go, so science and faith need not conflict.
Major works
- Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
- The Starry Messenger (1610)
- Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)
- The Assayer (1623)
- Two New Sciences (1638)
In the Book corner
- Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
A dialogue in Italian, set over four days in Venice, comparing the Ptolemaic system, with the earth at rest at the centre,…
In the conversation
No topics yet. Start one about this thinker.