Galileo Galilei is an Italian scientist who was born in 1564. He made a number of discoveries and inventions including the forerunner of the modern thermometer and understanding nature using mathematics as the underlining tool. This lead to the modern scientific approach of looking at the natural world and is the current methodology we use to understand our world. We now expect science to provide evidence of its theories in the form of reproduceable experimentation. This fundamental change in outlook has allowed the world to enter the technological age it currently enjoys. The formation of this model to build knowledge has served man well for over four centuries.
Perhaps he is most famous for taking on the might of the Catholic church. Galileo used the telescope to observe the heavens, first the moon describing its uneven surface, it has been thought to be smooth until then. He went on to discover four moons of Jupiter and that there were alot more stars in the sky than can be seen by the naked eye. But most threatening to the status quo at the time, was his theory that the sun did not revolve around the earth, but rather the other way round. His continued publicising of this corpernican view of the galaxy got him into trouble with the Pope and led to his subsequent exile in Florence.
