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After four years, Galileo had announced to his father that he wanted to
be a monk. This was not exactly what father had in mind, so Galileo
was hastily withdrawn from the monastery. In 1581, at the age of 17,
he entered the University of Pisa to study.
On 31 October 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the
Galileo affair was handled, and issued a declaration acknowledging the
errors committed by the Catholic Church tribunal that judged the
scientific positions of Galileo Galilei, as the result of a study conducted
by the Pontifical Council for Culture. In March 2008 the head of the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Nicola Cabibbo, announced a plan to
honor Galileo by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls. In
December of the same year, during events to mark the 400th
anniversary of Galileo's earliest telescopic observations, Pope Benedict
XVI praised his contributions to astronomy. A month later, however, the
head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Gianfranco Ravasi, revealed
that the plan to erect a statue of Galileo in the grounds of the Vatican
had been suspended.
Revolutionary of science
Galileo Galilei was the most well-known and successful scientist of the
Scientific Revolution. In 1604, by observing the appearance of a new
luminous body in the remote region of space for which no motion of
the stars could be detected, he demonstrated that the remote and,
according to Aristotelian cosmology, static region of space was not
actually static. In 1609, Galileo introduced both the telescope and the
microscope. His first observations with the telescope were published in
1610, in a 24-page booklet entitled Messenger of the Heavens. The
first half of the booklet described Galileo's observation of the surface of
the moon, which he proved was rough rather than smooth. He
professed the existence of up to ten times as many distant, seemingly
fixed stars as were currently known. The second half of the book is
largely devoted to the moons of Jupiter. In 1612, Galileo announced
that through the observation of dark spots on the sun, he had
concluded that the sun itself was revolving. This announcement
spawned one of his first conflicts with the Church, which considered
these findings contrary to Church doctrine. In 1616, the Inquisition
warned Galileo to "abandon these opinions." A few days later, the
works of Copernicus were "suspended till corrected."
Despite enjoying the honors bestowed upon him by the Venetian
Senate, Galileo continued to negotiate for a new appointment in
Florence, where his former pupil, Prince Cosimo de Medici, had become
Grand Duke Cosimo II. When, in March 1610, he published his
discovery of the lunar surface and the moons of Jupiter in a Latin
treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius, or "The Starry Messenger," he went
so far as to dedicate the work to Cosimo, and even named the newly
discovered moons the "Medicean Stars," after the Medici family. Galileo
was soon rewarded for his efforts at wooing the powerful family: in June
of 1610, he gained appointment as "First Mathematician of the
University of Pisa, and First Mathematician and Philosopher to the
Grand Duke," as well as a sizable annual salary, and exemption from
the obligation to teach classes. He abandoned Venice and Padua for
Florence and Pisa without a backward glanceending his decade-long
relationship with Marina Gambi, the mother of his children for the sake
of his ambitionand while there was great rejoicing in Tuscany, the
Venetians cursed his duplicity and arrogance.
DEATH
Galileo continued to receive visitors until 1642, when, after suffering
fever and heart palpitations, he died on 8 January 1642, aged 77. The
Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II, wished to bury him in the main
body of the Basilica of Santa Croce, next to the tombs of his father and
other ancestors, and to erect a marble mausoleum in his honor. These
plans were dropped, however, after Pope Urban VIII and his nephew,
Cardinal Francesco Barberini, protested, because Galileo had been
condemned by the Catholic Church for "vehement suspicion of heresy".
He was instead buried in a small room next to the novices' chapel at
the end of a corridor from the southern transept of the basilica to the
sacristy. He was reburied in the main body of the basilica in 1737 after
a monument had been erected there in his honor; during this move,
three fingers and a tooth were removed from his remains. One of these
fingers, the middle finger from Galileo's right hand, is currently on
exhibition at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy.