Well, any of us who has ever looked through a telescope could say the same, for the two principal types in use today were developed by giants: the refractor by Galileo and the reflector by Newton.

The drama of Galileo's trial by the Inquisition in 1633 has cast him as a renegade astronomer who scoffed at the Bible and drew fire from a Church blind to reason. Indeed, the myth of the martyred ...

Second, you soon want a bigger telescope. Galileo, who first trained a telescope on the night sky 400 years ago this fall, pioneered this two-step program. First, he marveled at what he could see.

3 min read The Hubble Space Telescope was designed to free astronomers of a limitation that has plagued them since the days of Galileo—Earth's atmosphere. Shifting air pockets in the atmosphere ...

Galileo Galilei was the founder of modern physics ... And he succeeded in making a telescope of the sort familiar to everyone today who has seen an elementary book on optics.