Galileo's Battle For The Heavens

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“This grand book, the universe, could only be understood if one learned to comprehend the language and the alphabet in which it is composed. That is, the language of mathematics—triangles and circles, geometric figures—without which it was impossible, humanly impossible, to understand a word of it. Without it, one wandered as in a dark labyrinth,” (Galileo's Battle for the Heavens). At a time when it was believed that the earth was the center of the universe and all other celestial bodies revolved around it, a new truth was beginning to be realized because of scientists and astronomers in the 17th century. Galileo was a central figure of the 17th century scientific revolution because of his invention of the telescope for space exploration, …show more content…

It was the belief in this theory that caused Galileo to encounter resistance from the church and other scientists, as it was considered contradictory to the bible. Upon discovering that the earth revolved around the sun, which was contrary to the Ptolemaic theory of the time, Copernicus chose not to make his study widely known for fear of the consequences. “Accordingly, when I considered in my own mind how absurd a performance it must seem to those who know that the judgment of many centuries has approved the view that the Earth remains fixed as center in the midst of the heavens, if I should, on the contrary, assert that the Earth moves,” (Copernicus, Nicolaus). Copernicus shared his theory of heliocentrism in a manuscript entitled Dē revolutionibus orbium coelestium and in a letter to Pope Paul in 1543 which explained his work and basis of his …show more content…

As Galileo began sketching what he was seeing through the telescope he realized that the moon is covered in craters and mountains similar to those on earth. “The engravings of the Moon, created from Galileo's artfully drawn sketches, presented readers with a radically different perspective on the Moon. Due to Galileo's training in Renaissance art and an understanding of chiaroscuro (a technique for shading light and dark) he quickly understood that the shadows he was seeing were actually mountains and craters. From his sketches, he made estimates of their heights and depths. These observations, only possible by the magnifying power of the telescope, clearly suggested that the Aristotelian idea of the Moon as a translucent perfect sphere (or as Dante had suggested an "eternal pearl") were wrong. The Moon was no longer a perfect heavenly object; it now clearly had features and a topology similar in many ways to the Earth. The notion that the moon had a topology like the Earth led to speculation on what life might be like on the Moon,” (Galileo and the Telescope - Finding Our Place in the Cosmos: From Galileo to Sagan and Beyond). According to the Aristotelian theory the moon was simply a spherical body in space and, unlike earth, was smooth. However by observing the moon’s surface through a telescope and creating diagrams of what he saw, Galileo

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