It’s May 1609. Galileo is forty-five years old, the father of three illegitimate children; a burned-out financially strapped university math professor in Padua, who is desperately seeking patronage from the ruling Medici family in Florence, so he might return to his ancestral home with security.

He hears about an unusual optical device just invented in the Netherlands that is apparently able to render faraway things as though nearby.

Could we get a glimpse into the mind of a man whose destiny it was to be the first human being to assault the heavens with a telescope, and explain to the rest of us what he saw?

Learn more by viewing Galileo’s posts in Galileo’s Journal

Galileo’s Science

“In questions of sciences, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”

Galileo Galilei, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science. He was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.

In 1610, when Galileo announced in The Starry Messenger his pioneering observations of our moon and Jupiter’s moons with the telescope, and subsequently observed the phases of Venus, he became a public advocate of the Copernican theory (that the planets orbit around the sun). This philosophy eventually brought Galileo into his infamous conflict with the Inquisition. During the trial of 1633, Galileo was forced to renounce the “erroneous” view he purported in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He was condemned to house arrest for the rest of his life. But Galileo’s greatest contribution was to come four years later, when blind and near death, he smuggled to a publisher in Holland, the manuscript of his second major book, Two New Sciences, which was to become the genesis of modern physics.

Galileo’s Music

“Thus the effect of the fifth is to produce a tickling of the eardrum such that its softness is modified with sprightliness, giving at the same moment the impression of gentle kiss and of a bite.”

Galileo and his lute– Wendelio Venere, Padova, 1582

Richard Fletcher, Luthier

Music played not only a unique, but an essential role in leading Galileo to his new physics. Because it is an art demanding precise measurement and exact divisions, music reflected the spirit of Galileo’s science.

One of Galileo’s most important discoveries, the law of falling bodies, can actually be traced to his early musical experiments with his father, Vincenzo Galilei, a musicologist and lute virtuoso. Together, they discovered the motions of pendulums while measuring with weights, the tensions of lute strings.

Galileo was an outstanding lutenist himself, whose “charm of style and delicacy of touch” surpassed even that of his father. Playing the lute was a source of great pleasure and a special comfort to him in his final years, when blindness was added to the many other trials of his life.

”Everything Galileo ever did has been challenged,” said the late Stillman Drake, Canadian historian of science and preeminent biographer of Galileo. ”But ultimately it stands up.”