Galileo

Born in 1564, the young Galileo was nurtured in the lofty intellectual environment of Late Renaissance Tuscany. His father introduced him early to the Medici academies, where he was drawn irresistibly to mathematics from an early age.

Before Galileo was appointed professor of mathematics at Pisa (1589) and Padua (1592), all scientific learning came from books arguing for or against Aristotle’s writings. Galileo taught that you could learn much more by studying nature, and in the process became the founding father of experimental physics – he showed that air had weight by weighing a pig’s bladder full of air, then puncturing it to show the difference; he defied the Aristotelian concept of opposites in nature by inventing the principle of the thermometer, demonstrating that hot and cold were merely relative aspects of the same phenomenon, which he called temperature; he debunked Aristotle’s precept that heavy bodies had a tendency to fall and light ones to rise with his famous Leaning Tower experiment, when he dropped variously sized balls and bullets and weights simultaneously and they all hit the ground at once.