History of Science, a — Volume 2 by Henry Smith Williams;Edward Huntington Williams
page 72 of 293 (24%)
page 72 of 293 (24%)
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and one that seemingly had so sound a philosophical basis,
evidenced the iconoclastic nature of his genius. That he did not rest content until he had demonstrated the validity of his revolutionary assumption shows how truly this great theorizer made his hypotheses subservient to the most rigid inductions. GALILEO GALILEI While Kepler was solving these riddles of planetary motion, there was an even more famous man in Italy whose championship of the Copernican doctrine was destined to give the greatest possible publicity to the new ideas. This was Galileo Galilei, one of the most extraordinary scientific observers of any age. Galileo was born at Pisa, on the 18th of February (old style), 1564. The day of his birth is doubly memorable, since on the same day the greatest Italian of the preceding epoch, Michael Angelo, breathed his last. Persons fond of symbolism have found in the coincidence a forecast of the transit from the artistic to the scientific epoch of the later Renaissance. Galileo came of an impoverished noble family. He was educated for the profession of medicine, but did not progress far before his natural proclivities directed him towards the physical sciences. Meeting with opposition in Pisa, he early accepted a call to the chair of natural philosophy in the University of Padua, and later in life he made his home at Florence. The mechanical and physical discoveries of Galileo will claim our attention in another chapter. Our present concern is with his contribution to the Copernican theory. Galileo himself records in a letter to Kepler that he became a |
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