Plato Edmentum - Introduction to Physics actual exam questions and answers

Galileo Galilei Created the first handmade telescope Galileo wasn't only interested in the beauty of nature however .... he wanted to know how nature worked. Galileo made observations using his telescope, which could magnify objects to more than .... 32 times their actual size. His observations and conclusions led to discoveries that intrigued and fascinated some people. Others were enraged because his findings ... contradicted the beliefs of the Catholic Church at that time. Based on his discoveries and his studies, Galileo concluded that Earth was not a large center of a small universe but rather a ... small body in a much larger universe. His conclusion overturned Aristotle's theory, which stated that Earth is a stationary body and all other heavenly bodies revolve around it. Galileo became the first scientist to discover that the Sun is the center of our solar system and that all planets, including Earth, move around it. Galileo Galilei () who is now regarded as the father of modern science. Galileo was born on February 15, 1564, in Pisa, Italy. Although he first aspired to be a doctor, he became a physicist, astronomer, and mathematician. Most of his contributions came from a combination of experimentation and calculations. Galileo was well known for the method of inquiry he used to understand events.... His most significant contributions to physics were the discoveries of the fundamental principles of motion. For example, he discovered that when two objects of different masses are dropped from the same height, they hit the ground at the same time. He was also the first to define speed as .... the ratio of distance traveled to time taken His observations of the stars of the Milky Way led to the hypothesis that the Sun is ... embedded within a disk of stars. Many of Galileo's observations challenged Aristotle's ideas, which had been accepted as true for centuries... In fact, his observation that the Sun, and not Earth, was the center of the universe was strongly opposed by the Catholic Church. For this reason, in 1633 he was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Galileo is considered the first true scientist and the first physicist ... but many more followed in his footsteps. Galileo Galilei Quote "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" Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish mathematician and astronomer. He was the first scientist to dispute the idea that Earth was the center of the universe. Instead, he proposed that the Sun remained stationary in the center and Earth revolved around it. This theory was known as the heliocentric model Copernicus proposed a direct relationship between the distance of planets from the Sun and the size of their orbits... This relation meant that a planet closer to the Sun would have a smaller orbit than one farther from it. At that time, Copernicus's ideas were hugely controversial. Still, they were influential, and the world started looking at the movement of celestial bodies in a different way. The heliocentric model was later supported by Galileo. Because of his ideas, Copernicus is considered the initiator of the Scientific Revolution. Galileo Galilei () Italian physicist, astronomer, and mathematician. He supported the heliocentric view stating that Earth and other planets revolve around the stationary Sun located at the center of the solar system. Galileo's fascination with telescopes led him to discover sunspots, to make observations about the surface of Earth's moon, and to discover Jupiter's four largest moons. Unfortunately, the telescopic observations of the Sun ... damaged his eyes, and he became blind at the age of 72. Issac Newton () English physicist and mathematician. He is considered to be one of the most influential people in human history because of his work to define classical mechanics. Newton's three laws of motion concern inertia, acceleration, and action and reaction. These laws describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and the body's motion due to these forces. Newton also investigated the phenomenon of light He invented the first reflecting telescope. This instrument was smaller than the conventional refracting telescope but had impressive magnifying powers. Using prisms, Newton discovered that white light is a mixture of a rainbow spectrum of light rays. He inferred that different colors of light bend at slightly different angles when entering or leaving a transparent medium such as water or a glass prism. Newton's conclusions about universal gravitation and the three laws of motion were so fundamental to the field of physics that we still describe most of the physical phenomena we experience as .... "Newtonian mechanics." Benjamin Franklin () always curious about how things worked. This curiosity (and his interest in making some money) led him to invent a host of useful devices.