Abstract
Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa into a family of minor nobility. His father, Vincenzio, gave lessons in music (and studied its mathematical theory) and helped his wife’s family in their small business. He wished for his son a better than their modest (if not poor) standard of living. However, rather than choosing a career in business as recommended by his father, the 17-year-old Galileo entered the University of Pisa, intending to study medicine. Instead, he became a mathematician and, especially, the founder of experimental physics who also started observation of the celestial bodies using telescopes.
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Notes
- 1.
Del Monte came from a line of scholars specialized in the works of Archimedes and Pythagoras. Constantine Lascaris (1434–1501) was born in Byzantium, but he had to leave his native land after the fall of Constantinople, and he finally ended up in Messina, Sicily. He wrote about Pythagoras’ life and works. His students in Messina included Antonio Maurolico whose son Francesco Maurolico (1494–1575) was a famous mathematician and astronomer. Maurolico was the first to sight the supernova in Cassiopeia in 1572, now called Tycho’s nova. Besides, he edited the works of classical authors such as Archimedes. Federico Commandino (1509–1575) who published a major work De centro Gravitatis in Bologna in 1565, was Maurolico’s disciple through correspondence, and as we note in the main text, Commandino’s student Guidobaldo del Monte became Galileo’s mentor.
- 2.
A book by Foscarini was totally forbidden—the Carmelite Father had tried to show that the moving Earth is in accordance with the Bible. In 1620, “all other books teaching the same thing” were forbidden. It was not until the 1835 edition of the Index that Copernican ideas were no longer suppressed.
- 3.
Huygens came from an influential Dutch family. His father Constantijn was a diplomat and advisor to the royal family. René Descartes was a family friend who helped to organize Christiaan’s education at home, up to the age of 16. This leads to Huygens’ lifelong interest in Cartesian physics, even though eventually he could not accept it. Christiaan was sent to University of Leiden to study law and mathematics; his mathematics teacher was Frans van Schooten (1615–1660), an able mathematician from the well-regarded line of Leiden scholars. These included his teacher Jacob Gool (1596–1667), and Gool’s teacher Willebrord Snell (1580–1626). Snell had assisted Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler in Prague during 1600–1601. Huygens traveled widely, became a member of the Royal Society of London, and helped to organize a similar society in Paris. While in Paris, Huygens became a teacher of Gottfried Leibniz, by then a mature student with a doctorate in law. Leibniz developed a new version of the calculus starting in 1675, using the notation still in use today. Pierre Varignon (1654–1722) was one of the first to understand the new methods and develop them further under Leibniz’s guidance. Jacques Cassini (Chap. 9) was Varignon’s student. In his Cosmotheoros (1696), Huygens speculated that extraterrestrial life is possible on planets similar to the Earth and wrote that the availability of liquid water was a necessary condition for life .
- 4.
Kepler improved Galileo’s telescope with a design still used today. In the “Keplerian” telescope , a large objective lens forms an image of a celestial object at a large distance from the objective. The detail and brightness of this image are then examined by a magnifying convex eyepiece lens.
- 5.
In fact, Cassegrain’s telescope was an improvement over one suggested by James Gregory before Newton. Gregory did not actually build his version. In the Cassegrain telescope , the secondary mirror is convex which results in a short telescope.
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Teerikorpi, P., Valtonen, M., Lehto, K., Lehto, H., Byrd, G., Chernin, A. (2019). Galileo Galilei and His Successors. In: The Evolving Universe and the Origin of Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17921-2_7
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