Growing up in the 1570s, Galileo Galilei believed what everyone “knew” to be true at the time: that Earth was the center of the universe.
He went on to train as a mathematician. And in 1609, he built one of the first telescopes able to resolve details of celestial objects. He started by peering at the moon. The next January 7, he spotted what looked like four stars close to Jupiter. He kept spying on them and drawing them. Over time, however, he noticed something strange: Each star’s distance from Jupiter seemed to be rapidly changing.
Eventually, Galileo realized that these objects — celestial bodies that would later be known as moons — were circling Jupiter. This discovery caused him to begin questioning his beliefs. The Catholic Church had taught him that Earth was the center of the universe and that everything else merely moved around it. So how could those four star-like objects be spinning around Jupiter instead?
After many more nightly viewings and drawings, Galileo came to conclude that the sun was actually the center of the universe. This meant that Earth and other planets rotated around the sun. This idea made him very unpopular. In 1616, the Catholic Church put Galileo on trial. Its leaders pointed out that his newfound belief contradicted the Bible. The costs of this belief: The church convicted the scientist of heresy and sentenced him to house arrest for the remainder of his life.
None of this changed Galileo’s mind. And with time, his theory would become a basis for helping scientists understand the universe (although others would show the sun was the center of our solar system, not of the entire cosmos). Galileo also made other important discoveries. For such achievements, Albert Einstein referred to Galileo as the “father of modern physics — indeed, of modern science altogether.”
Scientists now point to one factor that may have contributed to Galileo’s scientific success: his ability to…
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