Galileo: The Way Things Really Move

Every first year physics students knows that objects "fall" due to the effects of the Earth's gravitational field. This leads to the familiar observation that an object that is dropped will moves faster each moment than it did the previous moment. This observation is perhaps neither intuitive nor obvious.

Galileo was the first person (of whom we are aware) to make systematic observations of and measurements of falling bodies.

Galileo's work on motion was later refined by Isaac Newton as he defined the well-known laws of motion.