Galilei Galileo
Prior to the mid 1500’s, religion had been the answer to many of life’s questions. Anything that was asked could be answered by the reading of the Holy Scripture. By 1550 the age of “scientific discover” came about. Scientist began to question not only the scripture, but they began to defy the Church. Around 1543 a Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, came out with a theory based solely on mathematical calculation commonly known as the heliocentric model. The heliocentric model theorized that the sun was actually the center of the universe and all of the other planets rotated around it. Unfortunately, Copernicus’ theory was dismissed due to the earlier findings of an astronomer by the name of Claudius Ptolemy. Ptolemy “popularized the ancient Greek conception of the heavens as a series of concentric crystalline spheres (occupied individually by the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), with the Earth at the center (Fiero, 2010). The Church accepted Ptolemy’s theory and stuck by it. Due to the Church’s heavy influence of the time, they would not even hear nor consider any other theories of the cosmos; and generally the people followed the decisions of the Church. So when Copernicus theory was proposed it was immediately shunned, and he was forced to stop all of his research.
Around the year of 1608, a Dutch lens-maker announced that he had invented a device that would allow a mere human to see a greater distances than ever imagined. An astronomer/mathematician by the name of Galilei Galileo found this invention very intriguing. He found himself occupying all of his free time trying to perfect this invention until he eventually discovered the telescope. Through its lens Galileo found himself studying an entirely different world, space. He was the first human to see the craters on the Moon, the rings around Saturn, and even the Moons of the distant planet Jupiter (Fiero, 2010). Through his observations Galileo discovered...