[horizion2025]

What's up with the Galileo hate? Even if he couldn't derive the area of a cycloid, doesn't give justification to condemn a whole scientific career (Galileo is the most overrated figure in the history of science?!). Shouldn't Galileo be measured what he did solve rather than what he didn't... failing one problem is hardly proof of general incompetence. Besides, he's not really known as a mathematician but more for his works in physics, and he certainly isn't considered one of the great mathematicians of his time.

Just a few things we owe Galileo in physics:

* The principle of relativity. You might think that was Einstein, but the first theory of relativity was by Galileo in his 1632 "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" (before Newton was even born!). Galileo introduced this idea with a brilliant thought experiment: He asked the reader to imagine being in a windowless cabin on a smoothly sailing ship. He argued that no experiment you could perform inside the cabin (dropping a ball, watching flies, etc.) could tell you whether the ship was at rest or moving at a constant velocity. All the laws of mechanics would behave identically. This is the cornerstone of classical mechanics. In the context of special relativity, Einstein "merely" added 'the speed of light is c' to the list of laws of nature that hold in all inertial frames. But the general way of viewing laws of nature relative as being invariant to motion was Galileo's (the principle of inertia), and essentially the starting point for Newtonian mechanics. It doesn't seem like the work of someone only able to fiddle around with scales.

* The Law of Falling Bodies: The discovery that the distance an object falls is proportional to the square of the time. The first truly modern mathematical law of physics.

* Detailed telescopic observations: Moons of Jupiter, Phases of Venus, Mountains on the Moon & Sunspots, etc.