Galileo LEVELED BOOK • V

Galileo
A Reading A–Z Level V Leveled Book
Word Count: 1,328

Connections
Writing
Research to learn more about one of
Galileo’s discoveries. Write at least one
paragraph describing the discovery and
how it changed people’s understanding
of the world.
Science
Draw a diagram or create a model of the
solar system. Include details that Galileo
discovered. Share your work with your class.

•V
P•S
Written by Keith and Sarah Kortemartin
Illustrated by Wesley Lowe

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 Galileo astronomy
controversial
Words to Know
pendulum
philosophers
gravity revolutionary
heresy solar system
laws of nature sunspots
measurable telescope
Photo Credits:
Title page, page 10 (left): © Granger, NYC; page 4: © iStock.com/GeorgiosArt;
page 7: Alexey Gnilenkov/Alamy Stock Photo; page 10 (right): courtesy of
NASA/JPL; page 12 (Sun): © Chad Baker/Photodisc/Getty Images; page 12
(Venus): © Stocktrek Images/Stocktrek Images/Getty Images; page 12 (Earth):
© Wavebreakmedia Ltd/Wavebreak Media/Getty Images Plus; page 12
(background): © iStock.com/Natalia_80

Written by Keith and Sarah Kortemartin

Illustrated by Wesley Lowe
www.readinga-z.com
Galileo
Level V Leveled Book
Correlation
Focus Question © Learning A–Z
Written by Keith and Sarah Kortemartin LEVEL V
Illustrated by Wesley Lowe
Fountas & Pinnell R
How do questions lead to new discoveries? All rights reserved. Reading Recovery 40
www.readinga-z.com
DRA 40
 Switzerland Austria
England
ATLANTIC Germany Introduction
OCEAN
France What do music, the motion of a chandelier,
France Italy and the planet Venus have in common? They each
Spain
Rome played a part in the
Pisa
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
discoveries of one
of history’s greatest
scientists, a man who
Corsica
lived five hundred
Rome
years ago . That man
Italy
was Galileo Galilei .
Sardinia
MEDITERRANEAN Galileo was born
SEA
in Italy in 1564 during
miles 0 100 200 300 400 500 a period known as the
kilometers 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 Sicily Italian Renaissance .
The Renaissance was a Galileo Galilei
Table of Contents time of excitement and
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 discovery . Painters, writers, mathematicians,
musicians, philosophers, and scientists all
Galileo’s Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 developed new ideas during that period . Galileo
The Student . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 was what we now call a “Renaissance man,” an
expert in several subjects at once . He used ideas
The Professor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 from many sources to make scientific discoveries .
The Astronomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Even more important, though, Galileo was good at
asking questions . Though this habit eventually got
In Trouble with the Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 him in trouble, Galileo’s questions would change
Science After Galileo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 the way we understand the world .

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Galileo • Level V 3 4
 The Student
As a young man, Galileo became fascinated
with math and physics—the scientific study of
matter, energy, and motion . Physicists study the
laws of nature, and Galileo had a gift for the
work . In fact, he made one of his first major
discoveries in physics a year before he entered
university .

On a windy day in 1582, Galileo went to a

church service . The church had a large chandelier
Galileo’s Childhood hanging from the ceiling . He noticed that the
Galileo was the son of Vincenzo Galilei, a wind outside was causing the chandelier to slowly
musician and composer . Vincenzo was curious swing back and forth . Sometimes the chandelier
about how music worked . He taught young swung only a few inches from side to side .
Galileo to be curious, too . Galileo would remain Sometimes the movement was much larger—
curious all his life . His habit was to look closely at as much as a few feet from side to side . But
everything, record what he saw, and try to explain Galileo noticed something strange . Although
what he had recorded . The explanations he came some swings were much wider than others, every
up with were sometimes truly revolutionary . swing took exactly the same amount of time .

Galileo • Level V 5 6
 By watching the chandelier, Galileo discovered The Professor
that a swinging pendulum could tell time In 1589, Galileo returned to the University of
accurately . Twenty years later, he published Pisa to teach mathematics, and shortly afterward
this discovery, and later he he was invited to teach math in Padua . He
designed the first pendulum remained in Padua for the next eighteen years .
clock . Clocks like his are still During his years there, Galileo was mostly
in use today . unknown . However, he continued to perform
Despite his early experiments . For example, he did several
achievements in math and experiments with falling objects to test ideas
physics, Galileo did not study about gravity . In the process, he proved that
math when he first entered the heavy objects fall at the same rate as lighter ones .
University of Pisa in 1583 . His Galileo made important contributions to
father urged Galileo to instead math and physics during his early career . But
become a doctor so he would the discoveries that would make him famous
have a steady income . Galileo’s were still to come . Galileo’s most revolutionary
medical studies never fascinated discoveries happened when he turned his gaze
him as much as math and physics, toward the sky .
though . Eventually, he persuaded
his father to allow him to study Do You Know?
math with a private tutor . There is a famous story about one
of Galileo’s experiments. When he was a
Galileo never finished his young professor, the story goes, he dropped
degree; he left university in two cannonballs from the Leaning Tower
1585 due to money problems . of Pisa. One cannonball was much heavier
For the next four years, he than the other, but they fell at the same
speed. Today, it’s not certain whether
made his living as a math tutor . Galileo actually tossed cannonballs from
However, he did not give up Grandfather clocks such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa as part of his
his interest in science . this one still use pendulums experiments with gravity.
to keep time.

Galileo • Level V 7 8
 As Galileo examined the solar system, he
made discovery after discovery . He was the first
European to observe sunspots . He noted that the
Moon had craters on its surface . He discovered
Jupiter’s four largest moons . And he was the first
to observe the phases of Venus . Galileo saw that
Venus appeared to change shape, just as the Moon
does . For example, Venus had a full phase, a new
phase, and crescent phases .

Galileo published some of these discoveries

in 1610 in a book called The Starry Messenger . The
The Astronomer book made Galileo famous . As he would discover,
though, fame had a price .
In 1609, Galileo heard about a “spyglass”
invented in the Netherlands . This was a tool
designed as a visual aid . When a person gazed
through the spyglass, faraway objects looked
much closer . Galileo had never seen a spyglass,
but he was interested in the concept . He figured
out how to build one, then quickly made
improvements on his original design . Soon
he was able to make distant objects look thirty
times larger; in other words, he built a telescope—
the most powerful in the world at that time . Galileo sketched the surface of the Moon (left) as he saw it through his
In a fateful decision, he began to use his telescope in 1610. NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
sent a probe named after Galileo to the Moon in 1992. The probe made a
telescope to study the heavens . detailed scan of the Moon’s surface (right) that clearly shows many of the
same features Galileo noticed hundreds of years earlier.
What Galileo saw through his telescope
changed his life, and astronomy, forever .

Galileo • Level V 9 10
 How Venus would look from How Venus actually looks from Earth
Earth if the Sun and Venus as Venus and Earth orbit the Sun.
orbited Earth.
Sun’s orbit
Sun of E ar
th
full
nearly full nearly full

new half Sun half

Venus’s orbit of Ear th

crescent crescent
crescent new crescent new

Venus
Earth

Earth

In Trouble with the Church But Galileo’s discoveries showed that the Sun
Galileo’s discoveries about the solar system got could and did change because of sunspots . The
him in a lot of trouble . In particular, the Catholic Moon was not “perfect” because it had craters . His
Church opposed his views . Why were sunspots discoveries also supported the idea that Earth was
and the phases of Venus so controversial? not the center of the solar system . Galileo showed
that the changing way Venus appears from Earth
The answer lies in the philosophy and religious
would only make sense if Venus traveled around
beliefs of the time . For centuries, the Catholic
the Sun .
Church had taught that the Sun, Moon, planets,
and stars all revolved around Earth . According In other words, Galileo’s discoveries were
to this theory, heavenly bodies such as the Sun strong evidence that the planets in our solar
were perfect and unchanging . This theory, which system revolved around the Sun, not Earth .
placed Earth at the center of creation, originally He was not the first person to come up with
came from the philosophers of ancient Greece . this theory . However, his discoveries were the
The Church officially adopted this theory long best proof yet that Earth was not the center of
before Galileo’s time . our solar system .

Galileo • Level V 11 12
 Do You Know?
In a popular, but unproven, story about this trial, Galileo was
defiant until the end. The legend claims that Galileo murmured,
“And yet it moves” under his breath after he was forced to say that
Earth did not revolve around the Sun. This episode is not included
in the records of the trial and is probably not factual. However, the
phrase “and yet it moves” has become extremely famous; people
quote it to this day.

Galileo published writings about his

discoveries that angered the Church . During
the Renaissance, the Church had the power to
punish people who spread, or even had, ideas
Galileo continued to write about his discoveries
that challenged the Church’s teachings . Galileo
after he was found guilty, however . He even
had committed heresy by insisting that the
managed to publish, despite being ordered not
Church was wrong . In 1633, he was ordered to
to do so by the Church . He published Two New
Rome to stand trial . At the trial, he was found
Sciences, which summarizes some of his work,
guilty and threatened with death . Galileo was
in 1638 . It would be his final publication; at this
forced to say publicly that his earlier discoveries
point, Galileo had become blind .
had been lies, even though they were accurate .
He spent the rest of his life under house arrest, Galileo’s health continued to deteriorate,
and he was also forbidden to publish . and he died in 1642 of natural causes .

Galileo • Level V 13 14
 Science After Galileo Glossary
astronomy (n.) a field of science involving the study
We now know that Galileo was right: Earth
of the stars, planets, comets, and other
and the other planets in our solar system all things found in space (p . 9)
revolve around the Sun . Galileo’s habit of asking controversial (adj.) causing much disagreement (p . 11)
difficult questions led him to make some of the gravity (n.) the natural force that tends to pull
greatest discoveries of his age . objects toward each other, such as
objects being pulled toward the center
Scientists are still using many of Galileo’s of Earth (p . 8)
research methods . For example, he was the first heresy (n.) a belief or practice that goes against
to insist that laws of nature could be described the official teachings of an organized
using mathematical equations . This argument religion (p . 13)
helped make science and mathematics separate laws of nature (n.) scientific truths or principles that explain
how nature works (p . 6)
fields of study, different from philosophy or
measurable (adj.) able to have a size or amount determined
religion . He was also one of the first scientists
in measured units (p . 15)
to insist on using measurable data in his pendulum (n.) a weight that hangs from a nonmoving
experiments . By doing so, he made it easier for point and swings from side to side
other scientists to test his theories . Scientists (p . 7)
still use this principle today . Galileo had an philosophers (n.) people who seek knowledge and truth
enormous influence on scientists who followed about life; people who study philosophy
(p . 4)
him, including Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein .
revolutionary (adj.) of or relating to the overthrow of
Today, we call him the father of modern science .
previous ideas or ways of doing things
(p . 5)
Science and the Catholic Church solar system (n.) a group of objects in space that orbit
In 1757, the Catholic Church removed Galileo’s book a star (p . 10)
from a list of banned books. In 1992, the Church formally sunspots (n.) dark patches that sometimes appear on
cleared Galileo of any wrongdoing. The modern Church the Sun’s surface, caused by changes in
accepts many proven scientific facts and has supported the Sun’s magnetic field (p . 10)
scientific research for centuries. telescope (n.) an instrument used to make distant
objects look closer (p . 9)

Galileo • Level V 15 16