Galileo Galilei: The Father Of Culture

What are the chances that two fathers and founders of culture would be born in the same year? Quite slim: yet a such a thing happened in 1564, when both William Shakespeare, the father of English plays and poetry, and Galileo Galilei, the father of astronomy and science, made their entrance onto the stage of life. Born in Italy to a poor nobleman, Galileo Galilei received his education at the University of Pisa, where his family wanted him to study medicine (Helden). However, much to the dismay of his father, while studying there Galileo would become enamored with mathematics and philosophy. Though he never finished university, Galileo’s reputation as a highly-educated mind spread quickly and provided him with prestigious positions in various

There was only one problem: Galileo 's findings concerning the moon went against the classical tradition of the church and culture. This accidental rebellion against long-held ideas persisted as Galileo continued to uncover ground-breaking truths about space; most of which resulted in heated controversy due to the fact that they went against the revered Aristotelian theory of the universe which stated that the earth existed at the center of all things. Galileo 's discovery of the four moons of Jupiter in January of 1610 proved that more than one center of motion existed in the universe. His findings of the phases of Venus proved that some planets revolve around the sun. And, finally, his explanation of sunspots directly attacked the common belief in a perfect and spotless universe beyond the Earth itself held by the majority of both commoners and church intellectuals (Helden). All of these discoveries turned Galileo away from the mainstream medieval model of the universe and beckoned him towards the Copernican theory that all planetary celestial bodies in the solar system revolved around the sun.

He was banned from speaking his mind concerning the validity of Copernicus ' model of the universe, temporarily suspended by the Inquisition, forced to neither hold nor theories charged with heresy by the Church, and admonished by Robert Cardinal Bellarmine to avoid teaching Copernican ideas in any shape or form (Helden). Thus slapped and silenced, Galileo held his tongue until the coming of Pope Urban VIII, a friend of the Italian astronomer and a man with a comparatively lax outlook when it came to the control of controversial discourse. Thus in 1623 Galileo gained some freedom to express his scientific beliefs --he even received permission from the pope to write a theoretical book on the Copernican argument. However, he quickly threw away this freedom by putting the pope 's favorite argument against Copernicus in the mouth of an intellectually foolish character at the end of the very book that the pope had given him permission to write (Pettinger). This stiff-necked resolution to stand only upon the bare facts regardless of deep-rooted cultural belief, a resolution that would result in what is known today as the Scientific Revolution, shook the principles of scientific study to their core. Galileo 's stance stating that scientific truths and ideas can and should be proven by both reasoning and testing perhaps finds its most fitting summary in the following quote from his letter to