Sometimes the simplest tools reveal the most profound truths.
At Standard Model Beverages, we believe the best theories are the simplest and most elegant ones. One such theory, the Copernican model of the solar system, or helio-centrism, was not widely accepted until a determined man built his own telescopes which recorded evidence that Sun does rotate around earth.
Refiner of the Telescope
Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy in 1564, the son of a musician and scholar, he was expected to study medicine but instead chose mathematics [1]. The decision to defy his father led him to a career in which he made such remarkable discoveries that he is remembered as the father of modern science [3].
In 1609, Galileo became aware of the Dutch eyeglass craftsman, Hans Lippershey’s 1608 patent on a “certain instrument for seeing far”, a “spyglass” that could magnify objects 3 times their original size [4], and began attempts to create his own. By methodically improving each individual aspect of the device, he was able to create a telescope that magnified objects 10 times the amount that the original device could achieve. Similar to the way the <S | M | B> team methodically improved each aspect of the ingredients in our agave sodas to create the ultimate refreshing beverage, Galileo optimized each aspect of the telescope in order to create a simple device with profound implications.
Removing Earth From the Center of the Universe
When Galileo first turned his improved telescope skyward in late 1609, he made discoveries that would topple 2,000 years of accepted wisdom. While Renaissance science had inherited an ancient view of the moon as a perfectly spherical and unblemished orb, Galileo's drawings revealed its surface to be more like that of our planet: rugged and uneven, marked by valleys, craters, and mountains [5].
His detailed sketches, published in his groundbreaking 1610 work Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), provided visual proof that the heavens weren't perfect and unchanging as Aristotle had claimed.
Starry Messenger also details Galilei's observations that Venus appeared in phases, similar to those of Earth's Moon (see his drawings below). This is evidence that Venus orbits Sun and, along with his later discoveries of Jupiter’s moons, contributed to the downfall of the centuries-old belief that the sun and planets revolved around Earth.
Galileo’s most revolutionary discovery was that Jupiter had moons orbiting it. On January 7th, 1610, He wrote a letter [6] containing the first mention of Jupiter's moons. At the time, he saw only three of them, and he believed them to be fixed stars near Jupiter. Night after night, he observed these "stars" change position and drew charts of their location relative to one another, eventually realizing they were actually moons orbiting Jupiter.
Galileo initially named his discovery the Cosmica Sidera ("Cosimo's stars") or Medicean Stars, though today we know them as Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, the Galilean satellites. This discovery was revolutionary because it could easily be seen that these moons were orbiting Jupiter, not earth.
In 1632, this revolutionary idea of earth not being the center of the universe was still not widely accepted and so Galileo wrote “Dialog on the Two World Systems”, comparing Copernican (heliocentric) to Ptolemaic (geocentric) world views, prepared as a dialog where two interlocutors argue for Copernicus and one for Ptolemy [2]. Despite the book being presented as a dialog, it was clear Galileo supported Copernicus and this was unacceptable to the catholic church who had him tried for “heresy” by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 and later sentenced to house arrest.
The Physics of Motion
Galileo's revolutionary thinking also extended to motion on Earth. Whether he actually dropped objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa remains debated [7] , but his experiments with falling bodies challenged another Aristotelian doctrine. According to the tales, told by one of his earliest biographers, Galileo discovered through this experiment (shown in the painting below) that the objects fell with the same acceleration, proving his prediction true, while at the same time disproving Aristotle's theory of gravity (which states that objects fall at speed proportional to their mass).
Galileo's law of inertia states that an object will continue to move in a straight line at constant speed unless an external force acts on it. This principle, later formalized as Newton's First Law, fundamentally changed how we understand motion.
Like our commitment to combining simple, high-quality ingredients to create something greater than the sum of their parts, Galileo proved that the most elegant solutions often come from methodically refining existing tools and observing every step of the way.
Citations
[1] Drake, S. (1978). Galileo at work: His scientific biography (6th printing). University of Chicago Press.
[2] Galilei, Galileo. (1632). Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo matematico sopraordinario dello studio di Pisa. E filosofo, e matematico primario del serenissimo gr. duca di Toscana. Doue ne i congressi di quattro giornate si discorre sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo tolemaico, e. Per Gio: Batista Landini. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.5479/sil.77185.39088015628373
[3] Einstein, A. (1933). On the method of theoretical physics. Philosophy of Science, 1(2).
[4] Van Helden, A. (n.d.). The Galileo Project. Rice University. https://galileo.library.rice.edu/
[5] Galilei, Galileo. (1610). Sidereus nuncius. Apud Thomam Baglionum. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.5479/sil.95438.39088015628597
[6] Usher, S. (2016, February 15). The Galilean moons. Letters of Note. https://lettersofnote.com/2016/02/15/the-galilean-moons/
