Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei turned a Dutch spyglass on the sky in 1609 and reported, in The Starry Messenger, mountains on the moon, moons around Jupiter and stars beyond counting. His defence of Copernicus brought him before the Inquisition in 1633; he abjured, and spent his last years under house arrest, blind, dictating the Two New Sciences, which founded the physics of motion and of materials and is the book the lists assign. He wrote in Italian rather than Latin so that ordinary people could read him, and his method of experiment and mathematics is what we mean by science.