This week, we look a little bit further back in time to Galileo Galilei, who you might remember from your Junior Cert history books.
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer and mathematician who claimed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around, spending his days under house arrest for heresy as a result.
Galileo is sometimes referred to as the “Father of Modern Science”, and with good cause. While we might take pride in doing the one job we have well, Galileo wasn’t up for that, dipping his toe in to physics, mathematics and astronomy with ridiculous success, while he was also known to bash out the odd tune on the lute, which he learned from his father.
Ironically, as a man who would later be charged with heresy, Galileo almost became a priest in his early days, before he convinced his father to let him study maths and natural sciences instead.
He threw together a few inventions, including coming up with a rough version of the pendulum, a more accurate compass, an early thermometer which he called the thermoscope, and later, around 1609, made a refracting telescope, which he used to make some pretty massive breakthroughs in the astronomical world.
With his telescope, he observed that some stars around Jupiter were moving, discovering that they were moons of the planet. It doesn’t sound like much now, but back in the day, this was revolutionary, since people believed all heavenly bodies revolved around the Earth.
Later, he observed that Venus and Neptune did not revolve around the Earth either, and defended Nicholas Copernicus’ theory that all planets must revolve around the Sun.
For these claims, Galileo ended up in front of the Roman Inquisition, who found him guilty of heresy and forced him to roll back on all his views, as well as placing him under house arrest for the rest of the life.
It was only in the year 2000, nearly 400 years later, that the Catholic Church eventually admitted they might have gone a little bit wrong in their judgement of the Italian, when Pope John Paul II issued a fairly wide-reaching apology, and included Galileo.
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