Galileo Matters More Than Ever on His 450th Birthday
Not every astronomer can claim to have enjoyed both the attention of the Inquisition and the Indigo Girls, but then again, Galileo was no ordinary genius.
Discoverer of moons, toppler of Aristotle's physics, and celebrated loser of history's most famous heresy trial, Galileo Galilei's greatest invention, in truth, was our own modern world.
On the 450th anniversary of his birth today, February 15, 2014, it's worth taking a telescopic look at the achievements of this unparalleled genius of the Renaissance. Born in 1564 in Pisa, Italy, Galileo lived to the age of 77, a life span that saw the start of the scientific revolution in Europe. (See also: "Galileo's Telescope at 400.")
Galileo is still in the news. An optical illusion he discovered in the 1600s caused Venus to appear much larger and blurrier—a "radiant crown," as Galileo called it—when seen through a telescope than when viewed with the naked eye.
The puzzle was finally understood just this week. Neuroscientists from the State University of New York College of Optometry report that the answer lies in the wiring of our visual brain cells. The brain responds to light and dark objects differently, so the brightness of a planet distorts its apparent size when it is seen against the dark background of space.
Heaven and Hell
"Infinite thanks to God," Galileo wrote in 1610, "for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden."
He was celebrating his discovery of Jupiter's four large moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Originally he wanted to name the moons after his noble patrons, four brothers of Florence's famed Medici family called Cosimo, Francesco, Carl, and Lorenzo. Other astronomers, perhaps thankfully, assigned more elevated names to the moons, ones taken from mythology for the consorts of Jupiter, king of the gods.
Those moons revealed that some objects revolved around something other than the Earth, which helped Galileo to discover heliocentrism, or the fact that the Earth circles the sun. This finding, in turn, would earn him the attention of the Inquisition, which investigated religious rebellion and heresy in the world of 16th-century Italy. The Vatican officially apologized in 2000 for Galileo's heresy trial, which resulted in the scientist being kept under house arrest for the last eight years of his life....MUCH MORE
