GALILEO AND THE MAGIC NUMBERS

Galileo Galilei was a man at odds with the period in which he lived. His discoveries and dissertations on science and astronomy seemed to the Pope to be in conflict with revealed truth. Galileo was forced to refute his own findings -- that the earth moved around the sun and rotated on its axis. His was a vanguard mind, unlocking the mysteries of the mathematical structure of the universe. His earlier findings were the isochronism of the pendulum and he demonstrated that the path of a projectile is a parabola while the improvements he effected in the structure of the telescope enabled him to draw the conclusions which the Inquisition deemed heretical. A serious biography, oriented to the science-minded, which projects the dawning of inquiry into the universe, spawned by the Renaissance.