Galileo Galilei 1564 -1642 "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo As a professor of astronomy at University of Pisa, Galileo was required to teach the accepted theory of his time that the sun and all the planets revolved around the Earth. Galileo's support for the heliocentric theory got him into trouble with the Roman Catholic Church. In 1633 the Inquisition convicted him of heresy and forced him to recant (publicly withdraw) his support of Copernicus. They sentenced him to life imprisonment, but because of his advanced age allowed him serve his term under house arrest at his villa outside of Florence, Italy. Galileo's originality as a scientist lay in his method of inquiry. First he reduced problems to a simple set of terms on the basis of everyday experience and common-sense logic. Then he analyzed and resolved them according to simple mathematical descriptions. The success with which he applied this technique to the analysis of motion opened the way for modern mathematical and experimental physics.