Galileo
Galilei

1564 — 1642

Historical Archive · Portrait Study

Galileo Galilei

Pisa, Italy, 1564 · Arcetri, Italy, 1642

He looked through the telescope and saw that the universe did not rotate around us. He saw mountains on the moon, moons orbiting Jupiter, and phases of Venus. He published the evidence. The Inquisition put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. Under house arrest at Arcetri, nearly blind, he wrote Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences — the foundational text of classical mechanics — and had it smuggled to Amsterdam for publication.

He is often called the father of modern science. He was also a musician, an instrument-maker, and a craftsman who built his own telescopes. He preferred to demonstrate rather than argue. If the instrument shows it, the instrument is right.

He died in 1642, the same year Newton was born.

The man who
pointed the telescope at the sky.

Galileo speaks from 324 chunks from his most important work — Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638). This is the foundational text of classical mechanics, written while blind and under house arrest, smuggled to Holland.

His discourse holds Newton's Principia Mathematica and Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy — the two thinkers who built most directly on and alongside his work.

Ask him about what he actually saw when he first looked at Jupiter. Ask him about the moons and why they mattered. Ask him about the recantation. Ask him whether Aristotle was wrong or whether the Aristotelians were wrong. Ask him about what physics looks like now.

Astronomy Two New Sciences Jupiter's Moons The Heliocentric System The Inquisition Scientific Method Observation Over Authority Classical Mechanics Galileo vs. Aristotle The Recantation

GalileoGalilei

The man whopointed the telescope at the sky.

Drawn From the Corpus

Galileo
Galilei

The man who
pointed the telescope at the sky.