Galileo, who died 359 years ago this week, moved Heaven and Earth.

Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 in Tuscany. He was the eldest of seven children.

Galileo 's father, a down-at-heels music teacher and aristocrat, wanted the boy to become a doctor. For several years, Galileo studied medicine at the University of Pisa, but his real love was mathematics.

In 1589, Galileo got a job teaching math at Pisa. He was a popular, gifted lecturer, although the university had to fine him for refusing to wear his academic gown, which, he wrote in a ribald poem, was a pretentious nuisance that kept professors out of the brothels.

Galileo never married. Over 12 years, he had three children "by fornication" with the beautiful young Marina Gamba of Venice. They didn't live together (she was merely middle-class) but Galileo popped over often by gondola and he loved their offspring. He would later place his two daughters in a convent (they were unmarriageable) for their protection, and he got his son declared legitimate (Vincenzio, a sullen teenager, eventually became a lawyer).

In 1609, Galileo was distracted from his experiments into the physics of motion by a new Dutch curiosity, the spyglass (an Italian colleague would later call it the "telescope"). He improved the optics and, one evening he happened to point one of his new scopes at the moon. He was amazed to see mountains and valleys.

Other surprises soon followed: Jupiter was circled by four little planets, the Milky Way was composed of faint stars and Venus showed phases like the moon. No mere gawker, Galileo saw evidence that the sun was the centre of things, not the Earth.

In 1610, Galileo published his revolutionary findings as The Starry Messenger, causing an international furor. He also built and exported more of his improved telescopes, so other scientists wouldn't think he was just making it all up.

Galileo, a devout Catholic, felt that Holy Scripture and nature could never be at odds. In 1616, however, he was warned by the Office of the Inquisition not to present the Copernican (sun-centred) view of the solar system as fact.

Galileo 's magnum opus, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), written for a mass audience, makes a case, via lively, humorous dialogue, for the Copernican view of the universe. The Ptolemaic (Earth-centred) view is argued by an Aristotelian dunce called Simplicio. To cover himself with the Inquisition, Galileo ends by saying the heliocentric theory "may very easily turn out to be a most foolish hallucination and a majestic paradox." No one was really fooled by this.

Galileo 's enemies were outraged by the book. Pope Urban VIII, who had been an old friend, was busy fighting an outbreak of Protestants in Europe and couldn't spare the time to read it. He was told the book was an insult to Catholicism.

In 1633, Galileo went on trial for heresy. The sick old man was forced into a grovelling apology and was put under house arrest for the rest of his life. It could have been worse, but he had friends, inside and outside the church.

Dialogue was banned, thus ensuring its success outside Italy. Galileo needed a new magnum opus. He composed Two New Sciences (1638), a treatise on the physics of motion and the best thing he ever wrote. Friends and well-wishers (they included René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and John Milton) found a Dutch publisher. Galileo wrote an introduction for his new book, declaring he was shocked, shocked to find the manuscript had slipped out of his possession.

By the time he held a copy in his hands, Galileo was blind, from glaucoma and cataracts.

In November, 1641, Galileo took to his bed with a fever. He died on the evening of Jan. 8, 1642.

Galileo speaks