Everything about Giovanni Battista Riccioli totally explained
Giovanni Battista Riccioli (
April 17 1598 –
June 25 1671), was an
Italian astronomer. He was a
Jesuit who entered the order in
1614. He was also the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body.
Riccioli was born in
Ferrara,
Italy. He devoted his career to the study of astronomy, often working with
Francesco Maria Grimaldi. He wrote the important work
Almagestum novum in
1651. By necessity, he opposed the
Copernican heliocentric theory though praising its value as a simple hypothesis.
He and Grimaldi extensively studied the Moon, of which Grimaldi drew a map. Much of the nomenclature of lunar features still in use today is due to him and Grimaldi. He also observed
Saturn, and was one of the first Europeans to note that
Mizar was a
double star.
Other books he wrote were:
Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri (
1661),
Astronomia reformata (
1665),
Chronologia reformata (
1669) and
Tabula latitudinum et longitudinum (published in
1689).
Despite his stated opposition to Copernicus's theory he named a very prominent crater (
Copernicus crater) after him, and other important craters were named after other proponents of the theory
Kepler,
Galileo and
Lansbergius. Craters that he and Grimaldi named after themselves are in the same general vicinity, while some other Jesuit astronomers have craters named after them in a different part of the Moon, near
Tycho crater. This is sometimes considered to be tacit sympathy for Copernican theory, which as a Jesuit he couldn't publicly express.
Between 1644 and 1656, he was occupied by topographical measurements, working with Grimaldi, determining values for the circumference of Earth and the ratio of water to land. Defects of method, however, gave a less accurate value for degrees of the
meridian than
Snellius had achieved a few years earlier. Snellius had been mistaken by approximately 4000 meters; but Riccioli was more than 10000 meters in error [Hoefer,1873]. Riccioli had come up with 373,000 pes despite the fact that references to a Roman degree in antiquity had always been 75 milliare or 375,000 pes.
Riccioli died in Bologna.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Giovanni Battista Riccioli'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://giovanni_battista_riccioli.totallyexplained.com">Giovanni Battista Riccioli Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
