Did Galileo have any achievements

Answer 1

In a nutshell:

No, he did not receive any prizes in his lifetime.

His major setback was the Catholic Church opposing his views and his findings.

Depends on what you mean by prizes. There were no awards as we now recognise them in Galileo's time, but he was rewarded in other ways. For instance, upon discovering Jupiter's four largest Moons he initially named them the Medicean stars' in honour of Cosimo de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, chiefly as he was after a highly-paid position in a Tuscan University.This succeeded and in June 1610, a month after publishing 'The Starry Messenger', a book on his astronomical discoveries, he became chief mathematician at the University of Pisa and mathematician and philosopher to the Grand Duke.

In 1611 Galileo visited Rome where he was treated as a minor celebrity. The Collegio Romano put on a grand dinner with speeches to honour his discoveries. He was made a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Lincean Academy, which had only been founded in 1603 as a centre for the ongoing scientific revolution. This honour was especially important to Galileo who, from this time on, would sign himself as 'Galileo Galilei Linceo'.

As for setbacks - being accused of Heresy probably counts! His support for the Copernican model of the Solar System, centred on the Sun, led to him publishing 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican', which was written as two individuals arguing the case between Ptolemy's view of the Earth at the centre (geocentric) and Copernicus' view of a central Sun (Heliocentric) . He called the character championing the geocentric view Simplicio and, whether intentional or not, put the words of Pope Urban VIII into this characters mouth. This caused an upset with the Church authorities, who tried Galileo as a heritic. It is likely he was tortured and threatened with being burned at the stake in order to make him change his views.

On 22 June 1633 Galileo was forced to kneel in front of the Inquisition and recant his belief in the Copernican planetary system and the motion of the Earth, and sign a confession decrying his beliefs and his work relating to them. His Dialoguewas banned and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, where it remained until 1835. Publication of any of Galileo's work was forbidden, including any he might write in the future.He was condemned to life imprisonment, but the very next day the sentence was commuted to perpetual house arrest. He lived the rest of his life at his villa at Arcerti near Florence, dieing on 8th January 1642 aged 77.

<<>> to understand the problem one must see the difference between using the heliocentric theory as a model for predicting planets' positions, which the church said was ok, and on the other hand saying the Sun actually is at the centre of the solar system, which at that time contradicted religious beliefs. The church did not want to change its views without proof, and there was no proof until Newton's time a lot later with the scientific discoveries of the laws of motion and the law of gravity.

Answer 2

As a student, he had to go against his father's wishes and study mathematics and physics instead of medicine. (His father was a noted musician and composer, and Galileo did learn to play the lute.)

He fathered three children out of wedlock, and contemporary Italian social stigma meant that his two daughters both entered a convent and became nuns. After his death, his son was belatedly recognized as his legitimate heir.

As a scientist, he championed the heliocentric (Sun-centered) theory of the solar system espoused by Copernicus, which led to his prosecution and conviction by the Roman Catholic Church as a heretic. Rather than imprisonment, he was under the most relaxed and nominal form of "house arrest" for the final ten years of his life. The only real punishment was the official banning of his later writings by the Church, including his last and arguably his most profound work "Two New Sciences" (1638).

Answer 3

Galileo Galilei did not win the Nobel Prize. The first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, 259 years after Galileo's death.