Galileo Appointed at Pisa

1589

The twenty-five-year-old Galileo Galilei was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa, a lowly post paying sixty scudi a year. He irritated his Aristotelian colleagues by rolling balls down inclined planes and timing them with his pulse. He was, for now, keeping his Copernican sympathies to himself. His experiments with inclined planes were already challenging the Aristotelian physics his colleagues taught as received truth.