Important Event of February – 15

2021-02-15

Important Event of February – 15

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy, on the 15th of February 1564.
He was an Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the scientific.

Personal Life

His father was Vincenzo Galilei, who was a scholar and a musician.
He was the eldest of five siblings.
In 1574, the Galileo family moved to Florence and he started his formal education in the Camaldolese monastery.

Known for

Galileo has been called the “father of observational astronomy”, the “father of modern physics”, the “father of the scientific method”, and even the “father of science”.
He was the first person to publish his observations of astronomical objects through a telescope.
He discovered that the Milky Way is made of many stars.
He discovered that the Moon has hills.
He found four moons around Jupiter.Those moons are now called the Galilean moons. He discovered sunspots, which are dark areas of the Sun. He saw that the planet Venus has light and dark phases just like the Moon.
This helped people to know that the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System, as Nicholas Copernicus had said.

Galileo’s Telescope

Galileo invented many mechanical devices other than the pump, such as the hydrostatic balance. But perhaps his most famous invention was the telescope.
Galileo made his first telescope in 1609.

Most famous for

When NASA sent a mission to Jupiter in the 1990s, it was called Galileo in honor of the famed astronomer.

Galileo’s main publications

Siderius nuncius (starry messenger). Venice 1610. Discovery of ‘new worlds’ with the telescope.
Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, Tolemaico et Copernicano. Florence, 1632. The famous ‘dialogue between two world systems’.
Discorsiet demonstration mathematician, intorno a due nuove scienze. (discourses and mathematical demonstrations relating to two new sciences) Leiden 1638. This, on the mathematics of motion, was not such a controversial subject, and was published in Holland, out of the Inquisition’s territory.

Death