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Galileo Observation

Decent Essays

There are only a few individuals in our history who’ve had as much as an influence on the world as the famous Italian intellect Galileo. He was one of the first astronomers to use a telescope to examine and observe the planet surfaces and the changes in their positions leading to the foundations of modern astronomy and physics. From our perspective today, a simple observation through a telescope may not appear that remarkable or overwhelming. As a part of the 21st century society we are constantly innovating and coming upon scientific discoveries on a nearly daily basis; researching and conducting experiments are essentially natural instincts in the academic world. The reality today, is substantially different from the reality Galileo faced …show more content…

He found Venus had phases like the moon, proving it rotated around the sun. He also discovered Jupiter had revolving moons, which didn’t revolve around the earth”. Galileo wrote, “the surface of the moon is not smooth, uniform, and precisely spherical as a great number of philosophers believe it to be”. These observations and statements led to Galileo openly supporting Copernicus’s model of the universe. Society and non-secular scholars around him immediately lashed back calling his claims heretical and contradictory to biblical perception, “The flux and change that Galileo now revealed bespoke a more chaotic system, a less-than-godly lack of organization”. Beginning to face rejection and dissent from a traditionally focused culture, most individuals in the early 17th century would have backed down and returned to the norm medieval paradigm of: god centered, authority centered church centered, and otherworldly. The thought process of the majority, revolved around the accepted meanings of scripture and the word of the Catholic Church, “the Roman Catholic Church was all powerful in western Europe. There was no legal alternative”. If the church told them their interpretation was misguided, they accepted the Church’s explanation with legitimacy instead. However, Galileo was not intimidated (perhaps …show more content…

First and foremost, we can observe the Challenge of Authority being essential to Galileo’s achievements. Without his courage and ability to question established ideas he would not have been capable of fabricating change - his discoveries led to the formulation of western medicine and science. Galileo trusted his own observation more than the observations of the established authority. In the current scientific realm and within the Renaissance paradigm we can see this theory of observation being fundamental to the concepts of experimentation and scientific progress. The same systems Galileo pioneered in the 17th century are being used in our lives every day. If Galileo had not stood up and spoke from his individual consciousness modern medicine as we know it may not have been possible. When he, “wished to show the satellites of Jupiter to the Professors in Florence, they would see neither them nor the telescope” (con’t) but their ignorance did not stop him from following his consciousness and ambition for the truth. That is why the term Father of Science has been coined for Galileo. He is one of the many who challenged authority and past traditions during the renaissance and ultimately helped lead to the development of the paradigm and western civilization. This idea of challenging authority is a major and

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