第九讲1理解天体和地上物体的.pptVIP

Italian scientist and philosopher. Galileo was a true Renaissance man, excelling at many different endeavors, including lute playing and painting. He attended medical school in Padua. While in a cathedral, he noticed that a chandelier was swinging with the same period as timed by his pulse, regardless of its amplitude. He began to study the isochronism of the pendulum in 1581, as well as the motion of bodies. Using an inclined plane, he showed that all bodies fall at the same rate. He also investigated cohesion, and concluded that a waterfall breaks when the weight of the water becomes too great, the same reason that water pumps could only raise water by 34 feet. Galileo described his views on dynamics and statics in Dialog on the Two New Sciences, which emphasized mathematics over rhetorical arguments. Galileo was one of the earliest to propose abstract dynamical theories which were ideal and would not be observed under less than ideal circumstances. Galileo observed the supernova of 1604 and tried unsuccessfully to measure its parallax. According to Copernicuss theory, the Earths motion must produce a parallax, but no such parallax was found until Bessel. Galileo grew interested in the heavens, and built his own a telescope in 1609 after the discovery of lenses was reported from Holland. Galileo used his 30 power telescope to discover craters on the Moon, sunspots which rotated with the Sun, the four largest satellites of Jupiter, and phases of Venus. This last observation demonstrated that the Copernican theory was correct, since phases would only be observed if Venus were always closer to the sun than to the Earth. Galileo published his observations in Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) (1611). For some famous quotes and diagrams from Siderius Nuncius, see MacRobert (1990). A complete translation is contained in van Helden (1989). Galileo also proposed Galilean relativity, which states that the same definitions of motion