HOW HE MOVED THE EARTH!
It was in the year 1609, 405 years ago, that the Tuscan scientist Galileo Galilei (there was no nation called Italy yet) first revealed to the world the optical telescope he had used to peer into the sky and to plumb its depths. The first telescope that Galileo made had a humble power of 3x (ie only magnifying 3 times) – a power much less than a modern child’s binoculars! Even if the telescope was first invented in the Netherlands just a year earlier in 1608, it was Galileo who first used it for astronomical observations.
Galileo trained his telescope at the moon, and discovered the valleys and mountains on its surface. Measuring the lengths of the shadows on the moon he even accurately calculated the height of the mountains on the moon – all with a telescope which had such a narrow field of vision that he could see only one half of the moon at one time!
Looking at Jupiter he observed four specks that moved from night to night, and sometimes disappeared behind the planet. He inferred that these were the moons of Jupiter, orbiting around Jupiter, in the same way as the moon was orbiting the earth. Take a 100x telescope and look at Jupiter yourself. Check if you yourself would get such an idea. Now think of a time when there was no electricity and no established science and only the Bible to guide you. Now that gives a perspective on his monumental discovery.
If other planets had moons just like the earth did, if the sun and the moon and the earth were not the perfect celestial objects that they were believed to be, then the earth was perhaps not that unique? What a thought at a time when the world believed that the earth was the centre of the Universe created for humans in 6 days.
Galileo also observed material around Saturn - which better telescopes later revealed to be rings around the planet. He then looked at the planet Venus with his telescope, and observed that this planet also had phases just as the earth’s moon did. This was a game changer.
When Galileo saw dark regions on the surface of the sun, he called them sun spots and also proposed that the sun was rotating. What! the sun was rotating?
Looking at the nebulae he found out that the milky way was in fact made of stars!
He found that his observations with the telescope could be best explained by the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus who, even before the telescope was invented, proposed in 1530 that the earth was after all a planet, that it turns once daily on its own axis, and that rather than the earth, it was the sun around which all the planets orbited. The earth was not really special.
The genius in him did not allow him to accept what others proposed as the truth. He did not have a dark side to him like Newton did who was driven as much by science as rancour and petty and vindictive feelings of revenge. He remained a Catholic, had his 'illegitimate' daughter committed to a monastery, had his limitations, but he could hardly be considered a Christian like the others of his time.
Knowing the theological implications of Galileo’s work and thought, the Church first tried to stop him, and later punished him when he did not keep his promise to behave. Already in 1600 the original Taliban burnt the extraordinary and eccentric monk Giordano Bruno at the stake - Bruno who had gone even beyond Copernicus' idea of the universe. But Galileo was a friend of the Pope so received a slightly better treatment. Galileo’s trial is the stuff of legend and resulted in life imprisonment with the promise by him of good behaviour - but for someone like him it was indeed like a death sentence. In 1992, the Church meaninglessly and without sincerity did apologise to the dead man, some 350 after he died in 1642. To those diverted by this farce, the Freethinkers of France posed the question, but who were you to judge him in the first place?
I made a pilgrimage to his home town of Pisa. The Tower is leaning, and there is much tourism around it, and the Pisa town's airport is named after Galileo. Not that of Rome, only that of the small town of Pisa. The Church where he did his some of his experiments and where he watched the lamps oscillate only to come up with a theory to explain that pendulum motion has a reluctant acknowledgement of his presence - it is still smarting and hurting from the blow he dealt it. Yet he was no adversary of the Church, just a friend of the Truth. The Holy Book tells you how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go, he sighed.
The extracted confession and insincere apology obtained under duress averted the death penalty. Old, persecuted, ill, but the human spirit in full bloom, with a mind which grasped the universe like no one else in his time or before, the subversive did not stop. He wrote about the Two New Sciences.
It is true that Copernicus thought about it all before Galileo, but Copernicus did not dare to publish his theory, while Galileo had the guts and the literary prowess to do so – tongue in cheek, with mischief in his style only possible for a child who knew a secret that others did not and was unable to keep the information to himself. The curious child of the universe paid a heavy price for this because of the barbaric Church which opposed his theory.
It is true that the Greeks and the Indians also made heliocentric hypothesis even before Copernicus, but they were not systematic models - it was the scientific observations of Copernicus and Galileo that made it a most credible theory.
Together, Copernicus with his theory, and Galileo with his unassailable proof displaced the earth from the centre of the universe, upsetting the received wisdom of the ages that was also the orthodoxy of the Christian Church. It was a fatal blow to the model of the universe with the earth in the centre that was proposed by the Egyptian Ptolemy, and indelibly etched in the Holy book which allowed no revision - or for that matter, for many centuries, even translation.
As if what he did for the situation of the heavenly bodies was not enough, the astronomer, mathematician, philosopher and writer conceived of the crucial idea of inertia, which became later Newton’s First Law of Motion, founded Kinematics or the science of motion, theorized on ocean tides and improved various mechanical instruments and devices. All this by one person, in one life time?
“Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth” declared Archimedes somewhere in 250 BCE, grandly, but also with insight into how the Earth was moving in space. He was thinking of how a lever operates.
Some 18 centuries later Galileo, stood his ground, and with his little telescope and giant intellect moved the earth out of the centre of the universe and installed the sun in its place with the lever of scientific observation and analysis. Who ever had such strength and ability?
The Father of Modern Science lost his freedom and suffered for Truth's sake. Looking intently at the bright sun through his telescope he lost his eye sight, but he granted humanity a vision that will last for ever.
15 February is the birthday of Galileo Galilei.
It was in the year 1609, 405 years ago, that the Tuscan scientist Galileo Galilei (there was no nation called Italy yet) first revealed to the world the optical telescope he had used to peer into the sky and to plumb its depths. The first telescope that Galileo made had a humble power of 3x (ie only magnifying 3 times) – a power much less than a modern child’s binoculars! Even if the telescope was first invented in the Netherlands just a year earlier in 1608, it was Galileo who first used it for astronomical observations.
Galileo trained his telescope at the moon, and discovered the valleys and mountains on its surface. Measuring the lengths of the shadows on the moon he even accurately calculated the height of the mountains on the moon – all with a telescope which had such a narrow field of vision that he could see only one half of the moon at one time!
Looking at Jupiter he observed four specks that moved from night to night, and sometimes disappeared behind the planet. He inferred that these were the moons of Jupiter, orbiting around Jupiter, in the same way as the moon was orbiting the earth. Take a 100x telescope and look at Jupiter yourself. Check if you yourself would get such an idea. Now think of a time when there was no electricity and no established science and only the Bible to guide you. Now that gives a perspective on his monumental discovery.
If other planets had moons just like the earth did, if the sun and the moon and the earth were not the perfect celestial objects that they were believed to be, then the earth was perhaps not that unique? What a thought at a time when the world believed that the earth was the centre of the Universe created for humans in 6 days.
Galileo also observed material around Saturn - which better telescopes later revealed to be rings around the planet. He then looked at the planet Venus with his telescope, and observed that this planet also had phases just as the earth’s moon did. This was a game changer.
When Galileo saw dark regions on the surface of the sun, he called them sun spots and also proposed that the sun was rotating. What! the sun was rotating?
Looking at the nebulae he found out that the milky way was in fact made of stars!
He found that his observations with the telescope could be best explained by the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus who, even before the telescope was invented, proposed in 1530 that the earth was after all a planet, that it turns once daily on its own axis, and that rather than the earth, it was the sun around which all the planets orbited. The earth was not really special.
The genius in him did not allow him to accept what others proposed as the truth. He did not have a dark side to him like Newton did who was driven as much by science as rancour and petty and vindictive feelings of revenge. He remained a Catholic, had his 'illegitimate' daughter committed to a monastery, had his limitations, but he could hardly be considered a Christian like the others of his time.
Knowing the theological implications of Galileo’s work and thought, the Church first tried to stop him, and later punished him when he did not keep his promise to behave. Already in 1600 the original Taliban burnt the extraordinary and eccentric monk Giordano Bruno at the stake - Bruno who had gone even beyond Copernicus' idea of the universe. But Galileo was a friend of the Pope so received a slightly better treatment. Galileo’s trial is the stuff of legend and resulted in life imprisonment with the promise by him of good behaviour - but for someone like him it was indeed like a death sentence. In 1992, the Church meaninglessly and without sincerity did apologise to the dead man, some 350 after he died in 1642. To those diverted by this farce, the Freethinkers of France posed the question, but who were you to judge him in the first place?
I made a pilgrimage to his home town of Pisa. The Tower is leaning, and there is much tourism around it, and the Pisa town's airport is named after Galileo. Not that of Rome, only that of the small town of Pisa. The Church where he did his some of his experiments and where he watched the lamps oscillate only to come up with a theory to explain that pendulum motion has a reluctant acknowledgement of his presence - it is still smarting and hurting from the blow he dealt it. Yet he was no adversary of the Church, just a friend of the Truth. The Holy Book tells you how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go, he sighed.
The extracted confession and insincere apology obtained under duress averted the death penalty. Old, persecuted, ill, but the human spirit in full bloom, with a mind which grasped the universe like no one else in his time or before, the subversive did not stop. He wrote about the Two New Sciences.
It is true that Copernicus thought about it all before Galileo, but Copernicus did not dare to publish his theory, while Galileo had the guts and the literary prowess to do so – tongue in cheek, with mischief in his style only possible for a child who knew a secret that others did not and was unable to keep the information to himself. The curious child of the universe paid a heavy price for this because of the barbaric Church which opposed his theory.
It is true that the Greeks and the Indians also made heliocentric hypothesis even before Copernicus, but they were not systematic models - it was the scientific observations of Copernicus and Galileo that made it a most credible theory.
Together, Copernicus with his theory, and Galileo with his unassailable proof displaced the earth from the centre of the universe, upsetting the received wisdom of the ages that was also the orthodoxy of the Christian Church. It was a fatal blow to the model of the universe with the earth in the centre that was proposed by the Egyptian Ptolemy, and indelibly etched in the Holy book which allowed no revision - or for that matter, for many centuries, even translation.
As if what he did for the situation of the heavenly bodies was not enough, the astronomer, mathematician, philosopher and writer conceived of the crucial idea of inertia, which became later Newton’s First Law of Motion, founded Kinematics or the science of motion, theorized on ocean tides and improved various mechanical instruments and devices. All this by one person, in one life time?
“Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth” declared Archimedes somewhere in 250 BCE, grandly, but also with insight into how the Earth was moving in space. He was thinking of how a lever operates.
Some 18 centuries later Galileo, stood his ground, and with his little telescope and giant intellect moved the earth out of the centre of the universe and installed the sun in its place with the lever of scientific observation and analysis. Who ever had such strength and ability?
The Father of Modern Science lost his freedom and suffered for Truth's sake. Looking intently at the bright sun through his telescope he lost his eye sight, but he granted humanity a vision that will last for ever.
15 February is the birthday of Galileo Galilei.
