Speaker
Description
Enrico Dal Pozzo was born in Turin in 1822 and died in Perugia in 1892, he was the first holder of the Chair of Physics at the Free University of the city of Perugia which had just become part of a unified Italy. His scientific path intersected with the radical political upheavals of the Risorgimento and with the first years of Italian unification. He combined a rather controversial interest in mesmerism with rigorous studies on innovative themes, which made him a personality on the border between heresy and innovation, but definitely of importance in the panorama of Risorgimento physics. I will examine among the many study topics on which Dal Pozzo concentrated his interest, some particularly innovative for his time. These topics also allow us to carry out a survey of the state of the art of some physics topics as they appeared in the midst of the Italian Risorgimento, such as the study of physiological optics and the theme of unification of the fundamental forces.
