Galileo

During his time, Galileo had to walk a perilous tightrope for his scientific endeavors. Any slip, and he would’ve literally fallen to the fires of damnation. A priest, giordano, who believed the earth revolved around the sun was burned alive at the stake in Rome early in Galileo’s career. The Catholic Church was under ideological assault from the reform Protestants in the north. In order to maintain their power, the church resorted to inquisitions, to ferret out and eliminate any heretics. It is under these conditions that Galileo made his astounding discoveries in astronomy and physics. He sacrificed the last 10 years of his life, when he was condemned to house arrest for writing a book detailing his scientific beliefs.

Galileo studied medicine in Pisa, before quitting after a couple months to go to Padua to learn and teach mathematics. The university in Padua was not set up by the state or church, so it was a more intellectually free setting for galileo to develop his ideas. He would take a ferry to Venice on his weekends. It is there he met his mistress who would bear him 4 illegitimate children (he couldn’t marry her for her lowly rank in society). 

You could imagine galileo buying a toy for his kids. There was a curious toy was developed in Northern Europe which combined a convex and concave lens to form a rudimentary telescope. Originally, he wanted to study its optic properties... then he decided to fashion his own lenses to make his own telescope capable of seeing 10 times farther than any instrument made at that time. Seeing it’s military use, he went to Venice and invited the statesmen to the top of st. Mark’s cathedral in Venice. He showed the venetians that with the use of his telescope, they would be able to see and prepare for enemy invaders approaching the lagoons over 2 hours away. He was given a lifetime salary for this invention. 

With his financial matters in order, galileo took his new ‘toy’ to his courtyard in Padua and spent 8 sleepless week nights looking into space. At that time, his oldest daughter was 9. You could imagine the two spending father daughter time looking at the sky together in wonderment. He observed the moon and posited that its landscape was like earth’s with mountains and valleys. His watercolors show the chiaroscuro painting technique used by renaissance masters to show depth and volume. On other notebook pages, he noticed strange star movement around Jupiter. He would later posit these stars were moons and they were orbiting jupiter. These ideas ran against church notions, Ptolemaic notions of the heavens revolving around earth.