And Yet It Does Move

Italian physician, astronomer and mathematician – Galileo Galilei, convicted to death by the Inquisition for his strongly supported belief that the Earth is not standing still, but he had to waive that to avoid the death at the stake, but there’s a legend saying that after publicly denying his own belief, he whispered – And yet it does move! That happened in 1633, no wonder we call that period “dark ages”, because all the knowledge was accesible only to a church minority. Nevertheless, Galilei managed to discover the kinds of oscillation of the pendulum, formulated the laws of free fall of bodies under the influence of gravity, movement along an incline plane, introduced the concept of acceleration and inertia, which was of great importance to the subsequent development of mechanics. In 1609 he constructed the astronomical telescope, which was demonstrated in the tower of the church Sv. Mark’s in Venice. The following discoveries were the Moon’s and Venus’ surface sizes, Jupiter’s satellites, spots on the Sun…

The reason for Galileo’s taking front of Inquisition was the book Dialogue concerning the world systems, in which he elaborated the heliocentric Copernican system of astronomy, in which the center of the universe is not the Earth, but is the Sun around which all the celestial bodies, including Earth, revolve. He proved unsustainable Ptolemy geocentric system. This theory diminished the importance of not only the Earth but also of the Christian science, church, the Pope, and at the time it was considered heresy and the mortal sin.