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Galileo Galilei was an Italian jack of all arts and science trades who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. His discoveries about the effect of temperature on the density of liquids led to a thermometer being named after him.The instrument consists of a sealed glass cylinder containing a clear liquid and a series of bulbs with weights attached. As the temperature changes, the bulbs rise and fall depending of a number of mathematical principles first conceived by Galileo. It is not only functional; it is also very beautiful.
In the famous 1971 footage from Apollo 15, astronaut David R. Scott dropped a hammer and a feather at the same time on the surface of the Moon, thus confirming Galileo’s hypothesis that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate, regardless of mass or composition:
Undoubtedly that has been hammered into your brain since grade school. So, how do you explain this neat little video from the clever folks over at MIT:
Two wood boards are connected by a hinge. A small cup is mounted near one end of the upper board with a tee for a ball on the end. The board is lifted to a certain height, and when released the ball ends up in the plastic cup. This shows that the board has moved farther than the ball in the same period of time.
To see the video, visit the MIT News Multimedia website: Link – via Science2.0
So, the hinged plank has to travel in an arc, which is longer than the straight path that the ball falls through in order for the ball to fall into the cup. Notice that the plank hits the tabletop before the ball. Assuming air resistance doesn’t come into much play (after all, the plank has more surface area than the ball) Does this mean that gravity affects the plank more than the ball? Is Galileo wrong?
It’s been a long and undoubtedly strange journey for Galileo Galilei’s various body parts. Some of you will recall that when his body was reinterred in 1737, his middle finger was removed, along with several other body parts. The finger and a vertebra have been stored (and displayed) in museums in Florence and Padua.
However, after passing through various collections for several hundred years, a tooth, a thumb, and another finger “went missing” in 1905. It was just recently that they were identified:
“His lost fingers and tooth were bought by an unnamed collector at a recent auction, where they were being sold as unidentified artifacts contained in an 17th century wooden case…”
So will these appendages now be reunited with the rest of his corpse in the tomb in Florence? Well, not exactly. It seems they will “be exhibited from early 2010, when [Florence's History of Science] museum will re-open after current renovation work and will change its name to the Galileo museum.”
Those who find this entire business a bit bizarre are invited to also read or listen to NPR’s report about “The Twisted Journey of Napoleon’s Privates.”
This year is the International Year of Astronomy, so to help all of us armchair astronomers celebrate, New Scientist has a nifty gallery of the most important telescopes in history (from Eyes on the Skies: 400 Years of Telescopic Discovery
This one to the left is the Galileo Refractor (c. 1609):
Though he didn’t invent the telescope, Galileo improved on its design – gradually increasing its magnification power. And he was the first to realise that it could be used to study the heavens rather than just to magnify objects on Earth.
Here you can see Galileo demonstrating one of his telescopes to the ruler of Venice in August 1609 (Galileo is standing to the right of the telescope). In the years to come, Galileo’s observations – including the discovery of four large moons orbiting Jupiter – would lend credence to the sun-centred worldview of Nicolaus Copernicus, who removed the Earth from its central position in the universe.
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