![]() ![]() ![]() For 300 years, the Catholic Church and universities accepted the Ancient Greeks’ theories, particularly those of Aristotle and Ptolemaios: the Earth is stable in the center of the universe, and other objects in the sky revolve around it. Traditional beliefs about the nature of the universe were rigid and had been in place for a long time. ![]() Galileo’s discoveries would change the way the Church thought about the universe in a revolutionary way. The landscape he saw was against the traditional understanding of the Church, which assumed that all the objects in the sky revolved around the Earth. Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa Galileo Galilei’s first telescope Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition by Cristiano Banti (1857). Try to look past my cringe-worthy performance.7. Their pendulum is featured in the video above, which I did for WXXI a couple years ago about Foucault’s experiment. Simply take a trip to the science building at SUNY Geneseo. ![]() If you happen to be in the Rochester area, there is a Foucault pendulum a little closer to home. His experiment gained such popularity that he was soon asked to demonstrate his pendulum in the Pantheon in Paris, where there is a Foucault pendulum to this day. Galileo was right after all.įoucault first demonstrated his pendulum in his cellar. Watching the precession of a pendulum you can see the direct effect of the Earth’s motion. After several hours the orientation of the pendulum can be significantly changed. The effect is very small, but it builds up. As a pendulum swings, it will be slightly closer to the equator at one part of its swing, and slightly farther away at another part.Īs a result, the motion of the Earth causes the orientation of the pendulum to shift slightly with each swing, an effect known as precession. This means that while everything on Earth moves in a circle once a day, things closer to the equator move faster than things closer to the Earth’s poles. If you are near the north pole, you would travel only a small circle in 24 hours. If you are on the equator, you would travel the entire circumference of the Earth in 24 hours. Its orientation would never change.īut the Earth rotates, which means everything on the Earth moves around in a circle once a day. If the Earth were motionless, then a pendulum would swing back and forth in a perfectly straight line. With friction and air resistance, the swing of the pendulum will die down over time, but this happens slowly for a large and heavy pendulum. Once released it will swing back and forth at a regular rate. The experiment was devised by Leon Foucault about 200 years after Galileo’s trial.Ī simple pendulum consists of a mass hung from a wire or string. All he would have needed is a large pendulum. This raises an interesting question: is there an experiment Galileo could have done to prove that the Earth actually moves? It’s likely that nothing would have convinced the Church at that time, but there is an experiment Galileo could have done to demonstrate the motion of the Earth. Galileo, on the other hand, thought it was ridiculous to take poetic passages from the Bible literally. Galileo, they argued, hadn’t completely proven his hypothesis. Church officials admitted that Galileo’s observations gave the appearance of moving around the Sun, but argued that appearances could be deceiving. The central dispute between Galileo and the Church was whether Galileo could assert that the Earth really did move around the Sun (that is, as a scientific fact), or whether he should present the idea as merely a hypothesis. Besides, the Bible clearly states that the Earth doesn’t move. It seemed unthinkable that God’s divine creation-humanity-would be placed upon a minor planet, rather than at the fixed center of the physical universe. Heliocentrism was a huge theological problem for the Church. Both of these observations agreed with the heliocentric model of Copernicus, which held that the Sun was the center of the universe. He had observed the phases of Venus, which showed that Venus moved around the Sun, and he had discovered four moons around Jupiter. Galileo had good reason to believe the Earth moved around the Sun. It also exemplifies the frustration Galileo felt toward Church officials. There’s no contemporary evidence that Galileo actually said those words, but it makes for a good story. As the story goes, after making his public renouncement Galileo muttered under his breath “Eppur si muove!” which in Italian means “And yet it moves!” This conflict came to a head when Galileo was put on trial, and was forced to renounce his assertion that the Earth moved around the Sun. Galileo believed that the Earth moved around the Sun, but this conflicted with the theological position of the Catholic Church, which held that the Earth was fixed in the center of the universe. A famous story in the history of science is that of the trial of Galileo Galilei. ![]()
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