Where can I find a timeline on the life and work of Galileo?

Question

I need a timeline or a list of his accomplishments and dates. A brief description of each would be helpful too. Anyone know where I can find this for a paper(need source)?

Answer 1

Galileo Galilei - Biography
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Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564. He was the first of 7 children. Although his father was a musician and wool trader, he wanted his clearly talented son to study medicine as there was more money in medicine. So, at age eleven, Galileo was sent off to study in a Jesuit monastery.
After four years, Galileo had decided on his life's work: he announced to his father that he wanted to be a monk. This was not exactly what father had in mind for his gifted son, so Galileo was hastily withdrawn from the monastery. In 1581, at the age of 17, he entered the University of Pisa to study medicine, as his father wished.

Shortly thereafter, at age 20, Galileo noticed a lamp swinging overhead while he was in a cathedral. Curious to find out how long it took the lamp to swing back and forth, he used his pulse to time large and small swings. Galileo discovered something that no one else had ever realized: the period of each swing was exactly the same. The law of the pendulum, which would eventually be used to regulate clocks, made Galileo instantly famous.

Unfortunately, except for mathematics, Galileo was bored by most of his courses and outspoken to his professors. His frequent absences from class eventually led the university to inform Galileo's family that their son was in danger of flunking out. A compromise was worked out, where Galileo would be tutored full-time in mathematics by the mathematician of the Tuscan court. Galileo's father was hardly overjoyed about this turn of events, since a mathematician's earning power was roughly around that of a musician, but it seemed that this might yet allow Galileo to successfully complete his college education. In the end, Galileo left the University of Pisa without a degree--a college dropout.

Faced with the need to somehow earn a living, Galileo started tutoring students in mathematics. He did some experimenting with floating objects, developing a balance that could tell him that a piece of, say, gold was 19.3 times heavier than the same volume of water. He also started campaigning for his life's ambition: a position on the mathematics faculty at a major university. Although Galileo was clearly brilliant, he had offended many people in the field, who would choose other candidates for vacancies. Ironically, it was a lecture on literature that would turn Galileo's fortunes. The Academy of Florence had been arguing over a 100-year-old controversy: What were the location, shape, and dimensions of Dante's Inferno?

To modern ears, this type of question sounds like asking for the location of Sherlock Holmes's 221B Baker Street, or the size of Dr. Frankenstein's castle. But the question was absolutely serious, and Galileo, asked to answer the question from the point of view of a man of science, treated it with dignity. Extrapolating from Dante's line that "[the giant Nimrod's] face was about as long/And just as wide as St. Peter's cone in Rome," Galileo deduced that Lucifer himself was 2,000 armlengths long. The audience was impressed, and Galileo was remembered with favor.

Within the year, Galileo had received a three-year appointment to the University of Pisa, the same university that never granted him a degree!

The Leaning Tower of Pisa
At the time that Galileo arrived at the University, some debate had started up on one of Aristotle's "laws" of nature--namely, that that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. Aristotle's word had been accepted as gospel truth, and there had been few attempts to actually test Aristotle's conclusions by actually conducting an experiment!

According to legend, Galileo decided to try. He needed to be able to drop the objects from a great height. The perfect building was right at hand--the Tower of Pisa, 54 meters tall. Galileo climbed up to the top of the building carrying a variety of balls of varying size and weight, and dumped them off of the top. They all landed at the base of the building at the same time (legend says that the demonstration was witnessed by a huge crowd of students and professors). Aristotle was wrong.

A modern-day professor who managed to successfully show that, say, Isaac Newton was in error would immediately be granted a lifetime contract. Of course, that's assuming that the professor published results, showing a theory to explain why Newton was wrong. Galileo had no such theory, and consequently didn't publish his results. He also continued to behave rudely to his colleagues, not a good move for a junior member of the faculty. "Men are like wine flasks," he once said to a group of students. "...look at....bottles with the handsome labels. When you taste them, they are full of air or perfume or rouge. These are bottles fit only to pee into!"

Not surprisingly, U. Pisa chose not to renew Galileo's contract.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention
Galileo moved on to the University of Padua. Though he enjoyed the city itself, finding good friends with whom he could party, by 1593 he found himself in desperate need of additional cash. His father had died, so Galileo was the head of his family, and personally responsible for his family. Debts were pressing down on him, most notably, the dowry for one of his sisters, which was paid in installments over decades (a dowry could be thousands of crowns, and Galileo's annual salary was 180 crowns). Debtor's prison was a real threat if Galileo returned to Florence.

What Galileo needed was to come up with some sort of device that could make him a tidy profit. A rudimentary thermometer (which, for the first time, allowed temperature variations to be measured) and an ingenious device to raise water from aquifers found no market. He found greater success in 1596 with a military compass that could be used to accurately aim cannonballs. A modified civilian version that could be used for land surveying came out in 1597, and ended up earning a fair amount of money for Galileo. It helped his profit margin that 1) the instruments were sold for three times the cost of manufacture, 2) he also offered classes on how to use the instrument, and 3) the actual toolmaker was paid dirt-poor wages.

A good thing. Galileo needed the money to support his siblings, his mistress (a 21 year old with a reputation as a woman of easy habits), and his three children (two daughters and a boy). By 1602, Galileo's name was famous enough to help bring in students to the University, where Galileo was busily experimenting with magnets

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Answer 2

February 15, 1564
Galileo is born to Vencenzo Galilei, a musician.

1574
Galileo's family moves to Florence, and he starts to attend the monastery of Vallombrosa.

1581
He enters the University of Pisa to study medicine. As the story goes, Galileo was in the cathedral at Vallombrosa when he observed a lamp hanging from the ceiling swaying with perfect rhythm. He was fascinated that the lamp took the same amount of time to swing no matter how large the range of swing. He later would apply his theories of pendulums to clocks.




1584
Galileo, fascinated by mathematics and geometry, starts taking classes from Ostilio Ricci, a teacher in the Tuscan court.


1585
Galileo, not completing his degree, is forced to leave the University because of lack of funds. He returns to Pisa.


1586
He publishes an essay on the hydrostatic balance, a device to measure the mass of objects.


1589
He publishes a paper on the center of gravity in solids and is awarded a position as lecturer at the University of Pisa.


1589-1592
Galileo works on his theory of motion. Aristotle had said that bodies of different weights fall at different rates, but Galileo did not believe this.


1592
Galileo applies and is awarded the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua, where he remained until 1610. Padua is where Galileo did the majority of his work.


1604
Galileo publishes his theories, now called the theory of uniform acceleration. He proved that all bodies, regardless of their weight, fall at an equal rate, in the absence of friction. Also in this paper he stated that a ball thrown in the air follows a parabolic path.


1597
Galileo writes a letter to Johannes Kepler supporting his heliocentric universe theory over that of Aristotle. Galileo would have published, but he was afraid of ridicule.


1609

Galileo learns of the recent invention, the telescope. He returned to Padua and is able to improve the magnification of the telescope he bought to 32 powers.




1609-1610
Galileo makes many different observations about the solar system, using his new telescope.

The moon is an irregular, rough body, not smooth as scientists thought.
The Milky Way is composed of many stars.
Jupiter has many small satellites that he named, "Sidera Medicea," after his favorite pupil.
He made observations about Saturn, sunspots, and the phases of Venus.
He publishes the results in the 1610 book, "Sidereus Nuncius." ("The Starry Messenger")

1610
He leaves his position at Padua to become the first philosopher and mathematician to the grand duke of Tuscany. The Duke allowed Galileo more time to work on his projects.


1611
He visits Rome to demonstrate the telescope.


1613
After being so warmly accepted at Rome, Galileo writes three letters to formally take his position on the heliocentric theory of the universe. His main reason for believing Kepler and Copernicus were his observations of sunspots moving around the sun.


1613-1616
Rome and Galileo spend three long years in conflict. Because Galileo choose to write his 1613 letters in Italian, they enjoyed a larger audience than the religious and scientific communities. The Aristotelian Scholars saw the attacks on Aristotelian Philosophy to be attacks upon themselves. The Aristotelian Scholars united against Galileo. The Church, swayed by the Aristotelian Scholars declared that Galileo was contradicting scripture,


March 5, 1616
The Catholic Church formally declares the writings of Galileo banned, and warns Galileo not to "hold or defend his doctrines."


1616-1623
He retires to his home in Bellosguardo near Florence.


1623
Galileo writes his "Assayer..." in which he debates the difference between primary properties, (measurable, quantative) and other properties (smell) and writes his famous quote, "The Book of Nature is written with Mathematical characters."


1624
He again travels to Rome hoping to appeal the 1616 decree. The Pope does not repeal the decree, but he does allow Galileo to write on both sides of the issue, noncomentally, and equally supportive of both sides of the issue, and without making any definite conclusions.


1632
Galileo publishes his great work, Dialogo sopra I due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems--Ptolemaic and Copernican) IN compliance with the Pope, the work is set as a conversation between two men discussing the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems.





1632-1633
Simply put, all hell brakes loose in Galileo's world. The Pope, infuriated at the content of "Dialogo," places him on trial for one thing after another.


February 1633
Galileo is eventually placed on trial and at his old age, is forced to make the journey to Rome. He is under suspicion of "vehement suspicion of heresy," but is convicted of holding and teaching the Copernican belief. He is placed under house arrest for eight years until his death.


1634
Despite his house arrest Galileo publishes Discorsi e dimostrazioni mathematiche intorno a due nuove scienze attenenti alla meccanica (Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, a work about the principles of mechanics.


1638
Galileo makes the discovery, months before he went completely blind, that the moon makes monthly wobbles on its axis, called liberations.


January 8, 1642
Galileo Galilei dies from a long illness.

Answer 3

You can find it right here:
http://galileo.rice.edu/chron/galileo.html