Galileo Passion And Rivalry

This essay will address how passion and rivalry influenced Galileo to the contribution of the development of our natural scientific knowledge through the discovery of telescope, Copernican system, Heliocentric Solar system, and the discovery of estimating the sun’s rotation rate. Galileo’s strong passion of trying to explain as well as understand our world through discoveries and the rivalry against Kepler were the non-scientific factors that made Galileo’s discoveries all possible.

In the period of Galileo’s lifetime, it was believed that all the natural bodies outside the earth’s atmosphere rotated around the earth. However, Galileo did not agree. He had a strong passion to prove that all celestial bodies did not orbit around the earth. In order to prove that the theory was wrong, he mentioned his discovery of the observations of Venus and Jupiter’s phases. Due to the fact that Jupiter boasted moons which did not orbit around the earth, it was able to support the Copernican system and the theory was properly stated that the other …show more content…
He projected the sun’s image through the telescope to safely observe the projection. Galileo did not directly view the sun through his own telescope. He drew what was being seen. Galileo recorded that the sunspots were on the sun’s surface and the rotation of the sun. Since, Galileo was able to observe the sun, he described what he saw to make arguments of why the sunspots are located on the sun’s surface, and not due to the shadows covering the sun while passing in front of the sun. He started to think on how to estimate the sun’s rotation rate. He learned that near the sun’s edges when the spots first appear and disappear later, it has a little breadth, but in order for the length to be equal that they should appear in the middle of the sun’s disk. His detailed drawing of the sun made him able to estimate the sun’s rotation