Biography Of Galileo Galilei

On February 15, 1563 in Pisa, Italy Galileo Galilei was born; the first son of a famous musician Vincenzo Galilei. He was educated in a monastery and considered entering priesthood. His father, however, wanted Galileo to be a doctor as it would be a more prosperous career. Galileo went to the University of Pisa to study medicine but while he was there he accidentally went to a geometry lecture. He then convinced his father to allow him to study mathematics instead of medicine
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Because of financial problems, Galileo never graduated. He began to study the motion of objects and published the book The Little Balance which earned him a teaching position at the University of Pisa. There he studied falling objects and published Du Motu (On Motion) which contradicted the long accepted views of Aristotle. His criticisms of Aristotle caused him to be fired from his position at the University of Pisa, but he was quickly hired by the University of Padua. He stayed there for 18 years and his exciting lectures increased his popularity.

In 1609 Galileo created his own version of the telescope and profited by selling it to Venetian merchants. He used his telescope to observe the sky. He found that the moon was not a perfect sphere but was rather imperfect with craters and mountains. He also saw that Venus had phases much like the moon which proved that it orbited around the sun. With his telescope he also found the moons of Jupiter, which showed that not all things rotate around the sun. With this new found information he published The Starry Messenger.

Continuing his criticism of Aristotelian views, he published the Discourse on Bodies in Water in 1612, which stated that objects floated in water because of their weight compared to the dis...

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...e Bible.

The church's side relied on the claim that Galileo's heliocentric model directly contradicts passages in the Bible, but as the defense pointed out, the Bible can be interpreted in many ways. What could be meant as figurative language should not be interpreted as a literal truth.

The defense also made the point that the scientific witnesses on the prosecutions side, such as Aristotle, were not Christians but rather pagans. They were also from a different era; Aristotle died 1955 years before the date of this trial. This showed that the church was only clinging to the geocentric model because of tradition, not because of religion.

Overall I think that for the most part both sides were able to effectively prove their arguments. All of the witnesses provided adequate testimony. But, in the end, we found that the defense had a more convincing argument.