A giant in power of thought and passion

Sumangal
Four hundred and fifty years ago, on 15 February, 1564, a son was born to Master Musician, Vincenzo Galilei and his wife Guilia Ammannati of Pisa, Italy.  The couple, who in time were to have five more children, decided to name their eldest son ‘Galileo’, after an ancestor, Galileo Bonaiuti (1370-1450), who in his time was a renowned physician, teacher and politician, all in one.
The boy Galileo loved to play lute like his father and hear myths about celestial bodies.  He had another hobby – inventing things.  And, significantly, like his father again, it did not matter to him whether a particular statement came down from an unquestioned authority or was vouched by everyone around him; he had to check its veracity for himself.   These traits were to bring him lasting fame; and a lot of trouble too.
Thanks to his schooling in a monastery, Galileo wanted to become a priest, but in deference to his father’s wish, he enrolled in 1581 with the University of Pisa for a medical degree.  The parental decision was not without mundane considerations.  Doctors, then and now, were better off than most other professionals.  It was not for long, however, that Galileot pursued his medical studies. He was swayed more by matters closer to his heart than the mere lure of money.
Eventually, it was a lecture on Geometry that set Galileo’s mind and he persuaded his father to let him change over to mathematics and natural philosophy.  The turnabout proved fruitful.  In the next five years, Galileo had invented thermoscope, a forerunner of thermometer and authored The Little Balance, a book on the design of hydrostatic balance.  Come 1589 and he, at age 25, was invited to grace the chair of mathematics in the University of Pisa.
Consequent upon the death of his father two years later and the added financial liability towards his siblings this brought him, Galileo moved to the University of Padua and taught in that institution till 1610. There he made significant discoveries in physics, astrology, kinematics (the study of motion of bodies without reference to mass or force), mechanical engineering and biomechanics. Among the first to understand the phenomenon of sound frequency, Galileo also proposed a method for measuring the speed of light.  He provided the basic framework for Newton’s laws of motion and his proposition that the laws of physics are the same in any system that is moving at a constant speed in a straight line proved a precursor to Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
Galileo’s contribution to applied sciences was no less significant. Taking inspiration from inventors Niccolo Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte, he devised an improved version of Geometric and Military Compass.  The device not only ensured precision in gunnery and surveying, but also enabled students of geometry to construct any regular polygons and compute areas of polygons and circular sectors.  Galileo’s telescope gave the world a veritable tool to probe the heavens.  Though the credit of inventing telescope goes to Thomas Herriot, an Englishman and Hans Lippershey of Netherlands, Galileo’s telescope gave x30 magnification and unlike its precursors, showed upright images of the objects.
His abiding interest in the power of magnification – he was also to use a composite microscope in 1610 to observe the body parts of an insect – opened for him new vistas of astronomy. He discovered that like Moon, Venus too had its full set of phases. Galileo viewed   Saturn and discovered Neptune. Closely monitoring the Sun, he gave a new interpretation to sunspots.  Galileo was the first to suggest the existence of mountains and craters on the surface of Moon. He declared that Jupiter had three satellites revolving around it.  It was Galileo who first proposed that the Milky Way was not some nebulous cloud as previously believed, but a multitude of densely packed stars.
Ironically, Galileo’s accomplishments in science, that won him the admiration and friendship of some very powerful personages of his day, including Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who later became Pope Urban VIII and Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany (the latter appointed him professor of mathematics and his personal adviser for life), stood him in direct confrontation with the established thinking. The Greco-Roman philosopher, Ptolemy (90 AD – 168 AD), and all his predecessors had theorized that Earth was the centre of the universe and all other heavenly bodies revolved round it. Going by Ptolemy’s geocentric model, Venus could not have full or gibbous (when more than half of a planet is visible from Earth) phases, which Galileo had sighted.  Galileo’s discovery of three of Jupiter’s four biggest satellites clashed with the dictum handed down by none other than Aristotle himself that all the heavenly bodies revolved round Earth, which according to the great philosopher was the centre of the Cosmos.  Again, Galileo’s theory about sunspots was in direct contrast with the Aristotelian perception that celestial bodies came in immaculate form.
Contradicting age-old philosophical concepts was one thing, but it boded ill for Galileo when his findings ran contrary to what the Church preached. In the tumultuous Europe of the 16th-17th centuries, all divergence of opinion was denounced as heresy, and brutally suppressed.  Fifty years before Galileo’s birth, a Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), had privately circulated a hypothesis among friends that it was the Earth that moved round the Sun and not the other way round, as the Vatican authorities believed. Copernicus had completed his work On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres by 1533, but wary perhaps of the ire of the Church, he did not let his masterpiece see the light of the day till 1543, the year he died of natural causes.  Poor Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Galileo’s fellow Italian, was not as shrewd as Copernicus and had to suffer the excruciatingly pain of burning to death at the stake for supporting Copernicus’ theory of heliocentricism (holding the Sun as the centre of the cosmos).  The Inquisition made sure that the ‘heretic’s tongue was tied to render him speechless before the people who had gathered to watch him meet his gruesome fate.
Galileo came to the attention of the Inquisition in 1611 for the first time for his Copernican views. He wrote his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina arguing for freedom of inquiry and travelled to Rome to defend his ideas.  Five years later, his disposition about the Earth’s annual motion was declared heretical and he was formally warned at the instance of Pope Paul V not to hold or defend the Copernican theory.  Galileo however secured permission in 1624 from Pope Paul’s successor, Urban VIII, to write about the Copernican theory as a mathematical hypothesis. In 1630, Galileo completed his book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, comparing the Ptolemaic and Copernican models.  Initially cleared by the Vatican, the book was printed in 1632, but subsequently banned by Pope Urban VIII.
Clouds were thickening over Galileo’s fate.  After 18 days of interrogation, he confessed under threat of torture that he might have supported the Copernican theory in his book.  He also abjured his errors in a formal ceremony. But that was not enough for the Inquisition. He was found ‘vehemently suspect of heresy’ and sentenced to imprisonment for life.  Galileo remained under house arrest until his death in 1642 at the age of 77.
It is said that after recanting his own theory that the Earth moves round the Sun, Galileo had muttered to himself ‘And yet it moves.’ Whatever might be the truth of the legend, Galileo indeed was a committed man of science. His ultimate contribution to science was to give it an identity distinct from philosophy and religion.  Galileo held that the laws of nature are mathematical: ‘Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe … It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures…’   To borrow from Frederick Engels, Galileo Galilei was one among the giants of the Renaissance – a giant in power of thought, passion and character, in universality and learning.

Follow our WhatsApp channel