ABSTRACT
A major contributor to the Scientific Revolution. His lifelong studies of natural motions yielded the law of free fall, the laws of the isochronism of the simple pendulum, the parabolic trajectory of projectiles and, not least, a rejection of much of the ancient and Renaissance Aristotelian teachings on free and forced motions. His researches exhibited from the beginning his basic assumptions of the primacy of the material world as the object of knowledge and the reasonableness of expecting near-mathematical precision in the representation of that world. As a consequence, his work contributed importantly to the emergence in the seventeenth century of experimental natural philosophy in place of the discursive natural philosophy of the schools and to the replacement of the traditional, organic-biological view of the
world with what would become known as the mechanical philosophy. When he turned his improved telescopes on the heavens in 1609, Galileo found
convincing evidence that the Greek and Scholastic division of the cosmos into two distinct regions, the terrestrial and the celestial, could no longer be upheld and that the Ptolemaic system required serious revision at the very least. He took the occasion to begin defending the Copernican system publicly, constructing his support for it on a
thorough critique of accepted views, his own telescopic discoveries, and his analysis of the nature of the tides, the latter a product of his studies of natural oscillating motion. This brought him into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, and he argued for the right of the mathematician-natural philosopher to work and publish, free from any restraint by authority or tradition, civil or ecclesiastical. In the end, his trial in 1633 and subsequent confinement to house arrest made him a semimartyr to the cause of the new learning; however, he did arrange to publish, in 1638, his final scientific work, Discourses on Two New Sciences, thus bringing together results from his investigations into a whole range of topics over the fifty-odd years of his active career.
