Galileo, Galileo Galilei(noun)

Italian astronomer and mathematician who was the first to use a telescope to study the stars; demonstrated that different weights descend at the same rate; perfected the refracting telescope that enabled him to make many discoveries (1564-1642)

galileo(Noun)

The CGS unit of acceleration, equal to 1 centimetre per second per second. Symbol: Gal

Galileo(ProperNoun)

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), an Italian thinker and key figure in the scientific revolution who improved the telescope, made astronomical observations, and put forward the basic principle of relativity in physics.

Galileo

an illustrious Italian mathematician, physicist, and astronomer, born at Pisa, demonstrated the isochronism of the pendulum, invented the thermometer and the hydrostatic balance, propounded the law of falling bodies, constructed the first astronomical telescope, and by means of it satisfied himself of, and proved, the truth of the Copernican doctrine, that the sun and not the earth is the centre of the planetary system, and that the earth revolves round it like the other planets which reflect its light; his insistence on this truth provoked the hostility of the Church, and an ecclesiastical decree which pronounced the Copernican theory heresy; for the profession of it he was brought to the bar of the Inquisition, where he was compelled to forswear it by oath, concluding his recantation, it is said, with the exclamation, "still, it moves"; before his end he became blind, and died in Florence at 78, the year Newton was born (1564-1642).