Galileo, born in the 1500's, was one of the most influential voices of the Scientific Revolution.  He crossed boundaries and gave up everything for science, which got him in trouble with the Roman Catholic Church.  He dared to think of things in a new way, and modern science owes everything to him.  The persecution of Galileo was am abomination, as it set back a philosophical, mathematical, and scientific genius from achieving even more than he already had.

Galileo's discoveries were monumental, but he also had to deal with the less glamorous side of being a scientist in the 1500's and 1600's.  His equipment was rudimentary, and his discoveries are only made more amazing by the fact that he could find out anything by using them.  The thermometer that he invented was a failure, and his telescope, which seems very important to someone who discovered the sunspots on Venus and saw Neptune, was fairly rudimentary.  It had a magnification of 30x, while electron microscopes have thousands of times that today.  In fact, many people speculate that the reason that he was blind by the age of 70 was because of the strain of looking through his telescope.  Lack of equipment for scientists has always been a problem, yet some of the greatest discoveries have been made with the simplest of means: Mendel and his peas for example.  Mendel and Galileo both had a lack of equipment, yet Mendel became known as the father of genetics through his work with pea plants in a monastery, and Galileo became the father of the Scientific Revolution with a faulty telescope.

One cannot become one of the most famous and respected scientists and philosophers by twiddling their thumbs.  Galileo made some of the most shocking and controversial discoveries of his time, and proved that he has earned his spot in the Scientist's Hall of Fame.  Galileo was the first to see Neptune through a telescope, although at the time, he thought that he was seeing a distant star.  Even more astounding, Galileo proved that the universe was heliocentric.  Heliocentric means that he proved that the Earth rotated around the Sun, which was a huge feat at the time.  He discovered, using his home-made telescope, that there were sunspots on Venus, which proved that Venus was revolving around the Sun, not the Earth.  Through more experimentation, he was able to publish a book completely disproving the (until then) unquestioned theory that the Earth was at the center of the universe, and that all other planets, and the Sun, rotated around it.  While in modern times, it is taught that the Earth revolves around the Sun, this principle came from Galileo, 500 years ago.

While Galileo is extremely appreciated today, the same cannot be said for the leaders of his time.  While he was writing his book proving that the universe was heliocentric, Pope Urban VIII requested that his, and thereby the Church's, opinion be put in the book.  He also requested that Galileo show both the argument for and against heliocentricity, but that he prove that the universe was not heliocentric.  While Galileo did put the Pope's opinions in, he wrote them as quotes from someone else, so that it did not have he Church's authority behind it.  He also ignored the "request" to disprove heliocentricity, but not out of spite.  He merely had too much proof to say otherwise.  In his book, Galileo disproved Aristotle's teaching that the Earth cannot be moved.  He also disproved many Bible verses that said essentially the same thing.  Because Aristotle and the Bible were endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church, they felt that Galileo was attacking their accountability, and the Inquisition stopped the release of his book soon after it was published and released.  Galileo was called to trial, and found guilty of heresy.  He was forced to retract everything in his book, and was put in house arrest for the rest of his life, about four years.  While Galileo was publishing theories contrary to the Church, he didn't intend for them to be arguing against what the Church taught.  He said that some of the Bible shouldn't be taken literally, and that his findings only increased proof of God.  However, the Catholic Church wouldn't listen, and he was locked away.  This instance is similar to treatment that many scientists got from the Catholic Church.  Even today, some brands of Christianity, called Literalists, believe that everything in the Bible is to be taken completely literally, including that the Earth is at the center of the universe.  No matter what scientists do, there will always be religious skeptics, and Galileo is an example of that.

Galileo was a man with influence in both his time, and ours.  He made impossible discoveries with unimpressive equipment, he had to face the Church, and he was imprisoned in his own home for telling an amazing truth.  Galileo has shaped our world, and was wrongly persecuted for heresy.