A physicist and astronomer born in 1564, who finally pleased the Church by dying in 1642. At first he wanted to be a painter, but decided to study medicine instead. As a boy he was already extremely clever in constructing his inventions, and in his nineteenth year, he observed in a local church how the great chandelier, suspended on a very long chain, swung in an extremely slow, almost imperceptible circle once a day, thus discovering the physical law that is named after him and is still demonstrated in every stellar observatory. At twenty-two, he invented the Hydrostatic Balance.

Being poor, he supported himself teaching astrology and astronomy. Indeed, it was the former out of which astronomy evolved, and while the latter became an extraordinarily precise science, astrology remained an almost static system of superstitions.

For generations hence, the learned strata of society in Europe, more out of snobbery than knowledge, had geared their thinking according to Aristotlean teachings. Galileo, however, disagreed with some principles and on one occasion asked his disputants to walk over to the leaning tower of Pisa and wait below, while he climbed it. From the top, he simultaneously dropped two objects, one weighing two pounds, the other ten. Aristotle had claimed that the lighter object would touch the ground a little later than the heavier one, but the two objects traveled the same speed, touching the ground at the same time. Consequently, Galileo was accused of having used some dishonest magical trick, for no one could disprove what the entire world believed. But he always dismissed all authority, trusting only, from the start, his own opinion.

Thus, he also invented the compass, which we still use in our age, unaltered. And, on hearing that somebody in Holland had devised a contraption that made objects across the street look as if they were within touch when you peered through its glass, he proceeded to make four more, each more powerful, till suddenly... he looked at the Moon and saw its mountains. Instantly, he came to the conclusion that the Moon was a planet like ours, which was another unbelievable discovery, for Aristotle had pronounced once and for all, that it was a smoothly polished ball.

Of course, the learned elite of that epoch of backwardness, having been raised to BELIEVE everything that the theologians proclaimed, did not know the term PROGRESS yet. It is now, when no rational mind can accept theological gibberish as KNOWLEDGE, that real progress is made, depending on the very latest scientific TRUTHS being corrected, footnoted or disproven.

Look at Galileo's eyes! I was able to paint them making him being far far away from this theology-befuddled world.

If an impertinent fly suddenly sets her rump on my nose, just three inches away from my two eyes, which are 3 and 1/8 inches apart, I will startle you by looking at her, looking horribly cross-eyed. But my eyes return to their normal expression looking at you, across the table, for that distance obliges them to make a longer triangle between them and their focal point (since I cannot see both of your eyes at once, the choice comes to one.) The farther you look, let us say to a point on the horizon of a prairie, the more the triangle between the eyes and that point is elongated.

However, when you sit in front of me after speaking with me about my recently departed Joan, my wife, and after saying something meaningless and vanishing behind the curtain of being too far away to still be on this earth, you will notice, without my seeing you, that my eyes, though open, form NO TRIANGLE at all, for their retinas are as far apart as a newborn calf's legs. To convey in sculpture or painting an expression of being lost in thought, perhaps of sobbing before your own grief, on your knees, you must make the eyes look parallel at... nothing.

Galileo, instead of being cherished as mankind's benefactor who gave his Enlightenment when there was none, was packed into prison, where he was torturously kept for many years, to please the Christian God and the Virgin Mary, for to REALLY KNOW was un-Christian.