24 | SCIENCE ILLUSTRATED
ASK USWhat Happens to Ultra Smart
Kids When They Grow Up?
SHORT ANSWER:
They change the world.LONG ANSWER: Many people think
they are “ultra smart”. Some people
even exhibit extreme intelligence:
they learn lots of languages when
they are children, they complete
doctorates in their teens. Some
become stock market billionaires,
others get lost in academia, some
seem to amount to nothing out of
the ordinary at all.
These people are smart. But
they are not ultra smart.
You know who was ultra
smart? Galileo Galilei. How ultra
smart? Put it this way: when we
were uni, sitting in a boring
Communication Ethics tute,
watching a light fitting swing back
and forth, we were thinking: “I
am so bored. This lecture is crap.”
When Galileo sat in class
watching a chandelier swing
overhead, he thought: “My God.
The Earth goes around the Sun!”A LATERAL MIND
Okay the process had a few more
steps than that - but this is just one
example of the (literally) incredible
way Galileo’s mind worked, and
how this made him not merely
super, or mega, but ultra smart.
With the chandeliers thing,
Galileo was actually doing
medicine at the University of
Pisa at the time, and he noticed
that the chandeliers swung back
and forth at the same pace, no
matter how big the arc (that is,
a wildly swinging chandelier
might take seven seconds to do
a full swing, but so did a barely-
moving chandelier).
He rushed home and set up
some pendulums of equal length,
and noted their behaviour. This
was in 1591, a full one hundredyears before Dutch mathematician
Christiaan Huygens used
pendulums to create accurate
clocks. In 1591, Galileo was just 17.
Galileo then accidentally
attended a geometry lecture,
changed his major to maths -
which in the 1580s was about as
radical as changing to Interpretive
Dance, in that he had to get his
dad’s permission - invented an
early thermometer, invented and
got mildly famous for designing a
new kind of hydrostatic balance
(an extremely accurate scale), got
super-good at the lute, became an
instructor at a prestigious art
academy in Florence, and was
appointed Chair of Mathematics
at the University of Pisa.
National-grade lutenist.
Moderately famous inventor.
Institutional art expert in
chiaroscuro and perspective.
Head of the school of
mathematics in Pisa. 1589.
Twenty-five years old.A RENAISSANCE MAN
Between the ages of 25 and 46,
Galileo moved to Padua and
lectured in geometry, mechanics,
and astronomy, all while making
fundamental scientific
discoveries, including the
kinematics of motion.
He also invented a new kind of
military compass for gunners,
which probably saved a lot of lives
on the side of whichever
complicated city-state alliance
Galileo was part of at the time.
Oh and he also invented some
tube thing. You know the thing.
Looky-tube. Long-see-looky tube.
He rounded off this period of
his life by discovering the four
biggest moons of Jupiter, and
making some really wrong
descriptions of Saturn and itsTHE
BIG
QUESTION
The military
Sector was invented
simultaneously by
several people, but
Galileo was smart
enough to also market
it. He adapted the
device later for use
by civil surveyors,
earning him even
more sales (and cash).Galileo didn’t invent the
microscope, but he did
refine and popularise it.
The name “microscope”
was a deliberate pun on
“telescope”. It’s a tele-
scope for seeing really
small things, geddit?Galileo’s first
telescope magnified
objects by about 30
times, was blurry and
inaccurate, but it still
changed the world.“two side-by-side moons”. This
was because the piece of junk
15mm telescope he threw
together from scratch couldn’t
properly resolve the rings.
Another of Galileo’s leaps of
intuition occurred when he looked
at the Moon through his
telescope, and realised the
“scalloped edge” along the
shadowed side was a mountain
range sticking out at him.
How did he know the shapes
were mountains? Because he was
so good at drawing chiaroscuro,
which is all about light and
shadow. Unlike most other early
astronomers, Galileo’s artistic
mind could imagine how he’d
draw a grey mountain half-lost in
black shadow pointing straight up
at him. See, art is relevant!NOT RIGHT, BUT RIGHT ENOUGH
Because no one is perfect, Galileo
then spent some time insisting
the tides were caused by the
ocean sloshing back and forth as
the Earth orbited the sun.
He made this error because he
was trying to prove that the Earth
orbited the sun - which of course
we now know for sure it does.
And this just goes to show
that just because a scientist
interprets a bunch of data
incorrectly, it doesn’t mean his
basic premise is wrong... (hem
hem, climate change).
During his 50s Galileo published
a bunch of books and become the
Catholic world's leading
philosophical representative of
Mathematics. Not the department
of mathematics at some proto-
Italian university, all Mathematics.
All of it. During the 1620s, Galileo
Galilei was Maths.
He also caught a glimpse of a
compound microscope at an