Galileo Galilei is one of the most famous scientists of the Renaissance. In Italy he contributed to the fields of astronomy, mathematics and physics. He is known as the "Father of the Scientific Method", the method of testing a theory with experiments that is still used today. He invented the first practical telescope, discovered inertia, and devised a way to build a pendulum clock. wide-ranging interests in astronomy, mathematics, and physics changed scientific thinking and... Galileo was interested in a wide range of subjects. “As a teenager, Galileo was tempted to go to a monastery (Hart-Davis 82) Sixty.” Years after Galileo decided not to join a monastery, Galileo was tried by the Catholic Church for heresy and sentenced to life imprisonment (reduced to permanent house arrest). Galileo's father, Vincenzo Ammanati, a musician, encouraged his son to go. In medical school, Galileo attended medical school at the University of Pisa, but he ended up spending more time studying mathematics. At the University of Pisa, Galileo provided medicine with a pulse counter. The pulse meter had an adjustable cord that could be adjusted. to swing in time with a patient's heartbeat, and a scale based on the length of the pendulum's string would tell the doctor how fast the heart was beating. Galileo's pulse meter invention was stolen by medical authorities, but Galileo later had inventions for which he was recognized. (Hart-Davis 82, 83) In 1590, Galileo began his study of motion, disproving that the weight of an object affected its acceleration. Galileo designed an experiment in which he rolled balls down a slope with smooth grooves so that the balls rolled down...... middle of paper ...... A gap appeared at the top of the tube of mercury, and that gap was a vacuum. Another invention that Galileo contributed to was the invention of the pendulum clock. As a medical student, Galileo realized that a pendulum would be a good way to keep time. Galileo designed the first pendulum clock late in his life. When he designed the clock he was blind so he couldn't build it, and when his son built the clock the clock didn't work very well. The first successful pendulum clock was built (and patented) by Christaan ​​Huygens. Huygens, a Dutch scientist, made many other important contributions to the scientific field, such as the theory of light waves and built the most powerful telescope of his time. Pendulum clocks were the most accurate clocks until the 20th century, and United States standard time was based on pendulum clocks of the early 1900s. 1900..