Role of Galileo with References to book Galileos Daughter Essay

During an important time in European history, Galileo played a key role in the scientific revolution. He challenged widely accepted ideas and gave a new face to philosophy, astronomy and physics. While he was alive, though, he was much more than just a philosopher. Galileo Galilei had passions and values, which were portrayed throughout his life and accurately written down in Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter. He applied these values in his career as a mathematician and a teacher of physics, in his passion of astronomy and philosophy, in his loyalty to his church and country, and most of all to his daughter, whom he conversed with in the many letters of Galileo's Daughter. Unlike most of the history that is read in books, Galileo's story is of a real man with real values and faced with very controversial decisions. Some of these controversies involve the clash of his passion of philosophy with that of the most widely accepted Aristotelian teachings. An example of this is when Galileo looked into his telescope and saw the moon, with its large mountains and deep valleys (31). This discovery proves contrary to what was taught by Aristotle, that the moon was shaped as a perfect sphere. In addition to this, determining how objects accelerate during free fall consumed him for some time. He was known to test his theory by carrying cannonballs up Pisa?s eight story spiral staircase to see if an object?s weight and acceleration during free fall were not related as he had thought (19). This challenged another one of Aristotle?s teachings, which was that an object?s acceleration was directly proportional to its weight. His most significant controversies involved his passion of science and his loyalty to the Catholic Church. Religion... ...d because it offers a look into the life of a real man in history. Instead of painting a picture of a scientist in the 17th century, it tells the story of a man and his passions and values. Galileo was a man who loved mathematics and physics and was devoted to teaching his theories to others. He was a religious man who feared the extreme Catholic Church?s power as much as the next European. Still, he wrote his controversial astronomical and philosophical studies down on paper where they would be explored and researched decades after his death. Most importantly, though, the book Galileo?s Daughter portrays him as a man who loved his family, and still made time for his daughter during all of his ordeals. Galileo was not only a man of great influence to science, but also a man with passion, belief and conviction, and this is unfortunately forgotten in most history books.