When Renaissance - the great cultural movement started in Italy - swept through Europe, marking the beginning of the Early Modern Age, science experienced a rapid progress, just as fast as the development in art, philosophy and literature. During this accelerated period of scientific advancement, or the scientific revolution, an Italian scientist, mathematician and philosopher named Galileo Galilei is considered one of the first to pave the way towards the ‘revolution’. He was “born at Pisa in Tuscany, of which the chief city was Florence, on 15 February 1564, within a day or two of the death of that great figure of the Cinquecento, Michelangelo, and died in 1642, the year of the birth of Isaac Newton, the master mind of modern science”. During
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At the time, the teachings of Aristotle, a philosopher during ancient Greece, were used as the basis of science. Galileo, in contrast, found several doubtful points about Aristotle’s teaching. For example, “one question that Aristotle had not answered to Galileo’s satisfaction was how a projectile kept moving forward once the initial impetus was gone.” In year 1638, Galileo eventually published his Discorsi, concluding that “a motion does not need a force to keep it up. This fact is concealed by the constant presence around us of friction and resistance, and so even Descartes had imagined that each planet is kept in motion by a vortex in a fluid which fills all space. Galileo found, in fact, that a force changes the velocity of a body.” This discovery, though it was definitely against the teachings of the time, was a very important step towards understanding the relationship between force and motion. Galileo also disagreed with the relationship between an object’s weight and its falling velocity suggested by Aristotle. Galileo wanted to confirm if Aristotle’s suggestion really was the case. He “...confuted the Aristotelian teaching by letting spheres of different mass fall from the top of the Leaning Tower: according to Aristotle, whose …show more content…
He firmly believed that all natural laws, including motions, are provable with mathematics. He “established by measurements and calculations that the distance an object falls from a resting position increases as the square of the elapsed time.” His mathematical thinking also met with his creative imaginations, and he “found a way to describe the path of an object thrown off at an angle by imagining the motion to be made up of a vertical and a horizontal component” in 1608. But Galileo was not just obsessed with mathematics to prove natural laws : in fact, “he insisted upon and demonstrated the fundamental importance of experiment and observation, which was against the teaching of his time.” For instance, in his final book Discorsi e Dimostrazioni mathematiche intorno á due nuove scienze published in 1638, “a critical first step toward the development of a single set of natural laws for the entire universe”, he used experimental measurements to prove his mathematical equation for the acceleration of an object, in which the “distance increases in proportion to the square of the time.” Galileo’s use of experiments, observations and mathematics inspired later scientists, and became the basic step to approach almost all aspects of sciences today in a reasonable
At the time, the teachings of Aristotle, a philosopher during ancient Greece, were used as the basis of science. Galileo, in contrast, found several doubtful points about Aristotle’s teaching. For example, “one question that Aristotle had not answered to Galileo’s satisfaction was how a projectile kept moving forward once the initial impetus was gone.” In year 1638, Galileo eventually published his Discorsi, concluding that “a motion does not need a force to keep it up. This fact is concealed by the constant presence around us of friction and resistance, and so even Descartes had imagined that each planet is kept in motion by a vortex in a fluid which fills all space. Galileo found, in fact, that a force changes the velocity of a body.” This discovery, though it was definitely against the teachings of the time, was a very important step towards understanding the relationship between force and motion. Galileo also disagreed with the relationship between an object’s weight and its falling velocity suggested by Aristotle. Galileo wanted to confirm if Aristotle’s suggestion really was the case. He “...confuted the Aristotelian teaching by letting spheres of different mass fall from the top of the Leaning Tower: according to Aristotle, whose …show more content…
He firmly believed that all natural laws, including motions, are provable with mathematics. He “established by measurements and calculations that the distance an object falls from a resting position increases as the square of the elapsed time.” His mathematical thinking also met with his creative imaginations, and he “found a way to describe the path of an object thrown off at an angle by imagining the motion to be made up of a vertical and a horizontal component” in 1608. But Galileo was not just obsessed with mathematics to prove natural laws : in fact, “he insisted upon and demonstrated the fundamental importance of experiment and observation, which was against the teaching of his time.” For instance, in his final book Discorsi e Dimostrazioni mathematiche intorno á due nuove scienze published in 1638, “a critical first step toward the development of a single set of natural laws for the entire universe”, he used experimental measurements to prove his mathematical equation for the acceleration of an object, in which the “distance increases in proportion to the square of the time.” Galileo’s use of experiments, observations and mathematics inspired later scientists, and became the basic step to approach almost all aspects of sciences today in a reasonable