Galileo Galilei

An astronomer, mathematician, inventor, and author, Galileo Galilei

was a rebel genius in the 1600s who was sentenced as a heretic by the

Catholic Church.

*

He’s been called the father of modern astronomy, the father of modern physics, even the
father of all modern science, but Galileo Galilei (who is known by his first name only)
was a rebel. He did not set out to turn the science world and the Roman Catholic Church
on their collective ears, but that’s what happened.
The son of a musician in Italy, Galileo was a naturally curious man with a great gift for
mathematics and invention. When someone told him that a scientist in Holland thought it
might be possible to use a tube with glass lenses to see far away, Galileo sat down and
built the first modern telescope.
Sea captains and others loved his invention, but it was when Galileo turned one of his
telescopes towards the sky that he began to get into trouble.
In the Europe of the early 1600s, the Catholic Church was the ultimate power. People
who questioned its version of the world risked being labeled “heretics,” and arrested,
tortured, even killed. The Church insisted that the Earth was the center of the universe
and that the planets were perfect spheres, and anyone who tried to contradict these ideas
was in great danger. The problem was that Galileo’s telescope had shown him that the
Church’s teachings on this matters was wrong.
Galileo proved that the Earth orbited around the Sun, not the other way around. He found