Galileo Galilei

The influential work of ancient astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy) was translated into Latin.

The astronomer Galileo Galilei , using a telescope of his own invention in his garden at Padua, first observed the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and mountains on the moon.

Galileo published at Venice his recent astronomical discoveries (including the existence of the moons of Jupiter) in Sidereus Nuncius, or The Starry Messenger.

A committee of the Holy Office of the Inquisition passed judgement of heresy on Galileo 's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican (published in February 1632).

The scientist Galileo died, blind and still under the ban of the Inquisition ; Isaac Newton , who inherited his mantle as leading light in the field of science, was born on Christmas Day of...

The Italian scientist Evangelista Torricelli , a pupil of Galileo working on the flow of liquids in confined spaces, invented the first simple barometer.

Christiaan Huygens of Amsterdam patented the first pendulum clock (of which Galileo had produced a prototype fifteen years earlier).

Daniel Fahrenheit developed the mercury thermometer, in which the movement of mercury in a calibrated glass tube allowed for accurate reading of temperature.

For the first time in two hundred years the Papal Index or Index Librorum Prohibitorum did not list Galileo 's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican.

Bertolt Brecht 's Galileo, a powerful drama about the clash between state authorities and intellectual freedom, was first staged, in German, at Zurich in neutral Switzerland.