By Mikayla Lynch

Benjamin Wolff, the assistant director for the University’s music department was so inspired by the life of Galileo, that he wrote a book about it.

Wolff, who is also an adjunct assistant professor, told the story behind his book, “Galileo’s Muse,” in a performance last Thursday at Monroe Lecture Hall that included music and an inclined plane.

Galileo Galilei was an Italian scientist who lived during the 16th and 17th centuries. He was famous in the field of astronomy for discovering the “Galilean” moons around Jupiter, and for helping to define the laws of motion.

“It is the year 1580, it is August and the place is Venice,” Wolff said to open the show, setting the scene of Galileo’s first inquiry into the laws of motion. Galileo, after playing the lute with his father, walked through a hailstorm, where he noticed objects of different sizes falling at the same speed, despite Aristotle’s theory that the speed of a falling object depended on its size.

This image was constantly in his mind for the years to follow. Twenty-one years later, at age 40, Galileo spent almost all of his time in his workshop, attempting to make scientific breakthroughs that would change the way that the people around him thought about things.

As part of the show, Wolff repeated Galileo’s experiments. He dropped, from chest height, different sized metal balls into a black box on the floor to show the law of motion in action. After a short interlude featuring Renaissance-era music played by Dongmyung Ahn, Andy Rutherford, Vita Wallace, Charles Weaver and Wolff himself, he demonstrated Galileo’s “inclined plane.”

Wolff dropped balls along an inclined plane to show how the human eye perceives acceleration, but then he added frets along that plane so the experiment could also be experienced aurally. Galileo’s lute playing gave him the idea to measure distance between sound by putting frets on an inclined plane.

“At this point, Galileo began to see the lute as “his favorite muse,” Wolff said. This series of frets seemed to work, but not quite well enough for Galileo. As a musician, he had an internal beat, and he was able to use this form of measurement to move the frets on the plane around so that the ping from the metal ball would sound according to a rhythmic time signature, making the experiment easily replicated.

“Four Hundred years have passed since Galileo determined just how objects move,” Wolff said. “The formula that he came up with is still known today as Galileo’s law and it has changed the world.”