Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 in Pisa, Italy to a musical father and noble family. He studied physics at the University of Pisa and began experimenting with motion, disproving Aristotle's belief that heavier objects fall faster by showing that all objects fall at the same rate in a vacuum. Galileo also studied the pendulum while in university, discovering that the period of a pendulum's swing does not depend on its arc. This discovery helped him further study time intervals and develop the idea for a pendulum clock.