The life of Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei's life is both interesting and tragic, with his beliefs and advancements
clashing with each other, as one tries to kill him and his work, and the works he produced have
become so well known that he is known as the "Father of Astronomy.". Galileo was born in Pisa,
Tuscany, on February 15, 1564, as the oldest son of musician Vincenzo Galilei, who made
significant contributions to music theory and practice. The family moved to Florence in the early
1570s, where the Galilei family had lived for generations. He entered at the University of Pisa to
study medicine in 1581. Despite his father's objections, he grew fascinated by mathematics and
decided to pursue a career in mathematics and philosophy. Galileo immediately began preparing
to teach Aristotelian philosophy and mathematics, and a few of his lectures have survived.
Galileo left the university without a degree in 1585 and taught private mathematical lectures in
Florence and Siena for several years. During this time, he invented a novel sort of hydrostatic
balance for weighing small quantities and produced La bilancetta, a brief treatise that circulated
in manuscript form. He also started studying motion, which he pursued for the next two decades.
In 1589, Italian scientist Galileo Galilei was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the
University of Pisa. He developed several interesting theorems on centers of gravity that earned
him the praise of mathematicians. Later that year he was invited to deliver lectures on the layout
of the world in Dante's Inferno to the Florentine Academy. Galileo Galilei demonstrated in the
16th century that the speed of fall of a heavy item is not proportional to its weight, as Aristotle
claimed. He achieved it by dropping bodies of varying weights from the top of Pisa's iconic
Leaning Tower. His objections of Aristotle made him unpopular among his peers, and his
contract was not renewed in 1592. However, his sponsors gained him a position as professor of
mathematics at the University of Padua, where he taught until 1610.
Galileo Galilei’s career took a huge turn for the good, as his apparatus that he constructed
in the Netherlands, showed distant things as though they are nearby and by trial and error, he
figured out the secret behind his new invention. This is now known, as the telescope, his
invention where groundbreaking and, from then on, he polished and produced much more
powerful telescopes. His discovery of the now known, Galilean Moons, where it is the four
largest moons of Jupiter, the Moon’s phases, and also Venus’s phases. And then, his most
controversial pieces, that made him the enemy of the church, is the heliocentric nature of the
universe, at his time, it is believed that the Earth is at the center of the universe and hasn’t been
uncontested until Galileo Galilei came into existence, his pieces made it into the church and
excommunicated him for publishing this discovery, as it is blasphemous in the church’s
teachings. He got killed for this, and because of this event, his name and his work, became much
more appreciated and considered as a fact, up until the 21st century, where his works and findings
can still be helpful in guiding many astronomers, and basing many 21 st century technology to the
findings of Galilei in millennia. His work still influences many of our modern technology and
understand of our wider perspective of the universe, and without him, our world would be
completely different than what it is today.