As the Reformation in Italy was coming to an end, the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution were just beginning. The Reformation sparked people to start questioning the Catholic Church and the former accepted ideas. During the Enlightenment, philosophers emphasized individualism and reason, instead of tradition. In the Scientific Revolution, scientists and mathematicians started to prove old accepted theories about the Earth and the natural world wrong, through observation and experimentation (Uhalde). In the 1600’s people still believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and the stars, sun, and other planets orbited around it. In the early 1500’s Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, said that the Earth and the other planets actually orbited the Sun. The Catholic Church did not like someone proving Aristotle’s accepted theory wrong, especially after many people had rebelled …show more content…
His new theory disproved Aristotle’s claim that the earth is the center of the universe. Not only did Galileo prove the accepted theories of his time wrong, but he allowed astronomers and scientists after him to improve and make even more discoveries with his telescope. His discoveries with have paved the way for modern astronomy. Without Galileo’s actual invention of the telescope, we would know very little about space and the universe today. Galileo’s original discoveries were built upon and we are now able to send people up to space and have agencies such as NASA that discover more things about the universe and space each year. Thanks to Galileo’s telescope, more planets and constellations have been discovered. Also, we now know that all the planets orbit around the sun and the moon has different eclipses. Although many people of Galileo’s time did not believe his theories and thought he was insane, he continued to fight for his beliefs, and people finally began to realize that they were