Galileo: Intellectual Revolution in the Renaissance

Galileo: Intellectual Revolution in the Renaissance

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) has forever played a key role in the history of science. He is a key figure in the scientific revolution of the 17th century. His work in physics or natural philosophy, astronomy, and the methodology of science still stir up a discussion after over 300 years. His responsibility in promoting the Copernican theory and his trials with the Roman Church are stories that are retold even today. This essay is an attempt to provide an overview of the multi-faceted aspects of Galileo's life and work as an explanation of why he is a key figure in achieving in the intellectual revolution of the Renaissance.

For many people, Galileo is the 'champion' of modern science. Galileo's monumental discoveries were many. He was the first to observe the moons of Jupiter with his telescope. He calculated the law of free fall based on experimentation. He is known for defending and making popular the Copernican system, using the telescope to study outer space, and inventing the microscope. Galileo was the first 'real' experimental scientist, promoting the relativity of motion, and creating a mathematical physics. Taking into consideration all Galileo's accomplishments, his major claim to fame, however, is probably his trial by the Catholic Inquisition.

Philosophically, Galileo has been used to epitomize many different themes. Whatever is good about science in general, Galileo started it. More philosophically, many would ask, how his mathematics relates to his natural philosophy. How did he and his telescopic observations provide evidence in favor of Copernicanism? "In each of these cases there was some attempt to place Galileo in an intellectual context that brought out the background to his achievements. "#

The philosophical idea that persisted through Galileo's intellectual life was a powerful and mounting aspiration to find a new theory of what comprises natural philosophy and how natural philosophy ought to be pursued. Galileo points out this goal when he leaves Padua in 1611 to return to Florence and the court of the Medici and asks for the title Philosopher as well as Mathematician. This was not just a rank-establishing request, but also a manifestation of his fundamental goal. What Galileo accomplished by the end of his life was a precisely expressed substitute for the customary set of analytical notions associated with the Aristotelian tradition of natural philosophy. He offered, in lieu of the Aristotelian categories, a set of mechanical concepts accepted by nearly everyone who later developed the 'new sciences'. His way of thinking became the way of the scientific revolution#.

Galileo discovered the law of free fall, expressed as proportionality to time squared, through the inclined plane experiments#, but he endeavored to find an explanation of this relation, and the equivalent mean proportional relation, through a velocity-distance relation. His definition of natural acceleration as dependent on time is an insight acquired through recognizing the physical importance of the mean proportional relation.

Galileo began his work with the telescope in 1609. He used an analogy of the mountains on the moon to mountains in Bohemia. His theory implied that all matter is of the same kind, in spite of whether it is of space or earthly. Additionally, if there is only one kind of matter there can be only one kind of natural motion. Therefore, it has to be that one law of motion will hold for earth, fire and the heavens. As a central motivation for Galileo's accomplishments, it is beneficial to see him as being concerned with finding a unified theory of matter, a mathematical theory to explain what makes up the cosmos in its entirety. He described his discovery of the four moons circling Jupiter, which he named the Medicean stars (after the ruling family in Florence, his patrons). In the Copernican system, the Earth having a moon revolving around it was unique. Jupiter having moons made the earth-moon system non-unique.

The information above provides the basis for understanding Galileo's development. He established a new science of matter, a new physical cosmography, and a new science of local motion. Galileo established the new categories of the new mechanical science, the science of matter and motion. His new categories used some of the basic theories of traditional