Born to a musician father in Pisa, Galileo would grow up to challenge the Aristotelian worldview that had dominated European thought for nearly two millennia. His improvements to the telescope and observations of Jupiter's moons provided crucial evidence for the Copernican model of the solar system, eventually bringing him into direct conflict with the Roman Catholic Church.
Galileo Galilei entered the world on February 15, 1564, in Pisa, Italy, the eldest of six children born to Vincenzo Galilei, a musician and music theorist. His father initially pushed him toward medicine, enrolling him at the University of Pisa, but mathematics and natural philosophy captured his imagination instead.
Decades later, Galileo would turn a modest spyglass into a scientific instrument capable of revealing mountains on the Moon, the phases of Venus, and four moons orbiting Jupiter. These observations, published in 1610, undercut the geocentric consensus and made him a hero to some and a heretic to others.
His 1633 trial before the Roman Inquisition, forcing him to recant his support for heliocentrism, became one of history's most famous collisions between empirical science and institutional authority. He spent his final years under house arrest, reportedly muttering 'Eppur si muove' — and yet it moves — a possibly apocryphal but fitting epitaph for a man whose ideas outlasted his persecutors.