Since the advent of Quantum Mechanics the name of William Rowan Hamilton is familiar to every physicist. However, for multiple reasons the very original conceptions underlying Hamilton's work went largely unnoticed during the XX century and today are practically forgotten. In this communication I will trace a portrait of Hamilton's life and work, emphasizing how his Kantian philosophy of...
The 18th century marked the beginning of a widespread diffusion of thermometers and other meteorological instruments, fostering the birth of the first correspondence networks in Europe (including Italy), aimed at collecting and comparing meteorological observations from different sites. An active role was played starting from 1723 by the secretary of the Royal Society, James Jurin, who built...
In Southern Italy, the naturalist Giuseppe Maria Giovene (1753-1837) was one of the first to make regular observations of meteorological phenomena. From 1788 to 1797, he published annual reports of his observations, which also included his opinions on the outcomes of meteorological conditions on agriculture and human health. He was considered in his time the founder of meteorology applied to...
The Italian physicist Macedonio Melloni (1798-1854), who is best known for his work on “radiant heat”, devoted the last years of his life to the field of electricity and magnetism. As part of his research, he designed and built an innovative induction electrometer shortly before his death. This apparatus was presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Naples a few days after the scientist's...
On 30 June 1861, astronomer Angelo Secchi observed and made in tempera the passage of the Great Comet. He saw the intense light appeared above Rome during the celebrations of patron Saints, from which the drawing Cometa San Pietro took the name.
In his notebooks, he describes its extreme glow, calculates size and position, defining the tail as the longest in history and he traced some...
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...
Angelo Catone was a natural philosopher, physician and astrologer from Benevento who lived at the end of the Middle Ages. In Naples, he was a reader at the University, having excellent relations with the Aragonese court, becoming superintendent of the library of King Ferrante I and personal physician of Frederick of Aragon. At the court of France, Catone was a counsellor and royal physician of...
After spending twenty years in Bologna developing first-rate research in collaboration with the Jesuit astronomers of the College of Santa Lucia, Gian Domenico Cassini arrived in Paris in 1669 at the invitation of Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, to develop research to determine the longitudes of places and to define the first topographic map of France. Of the scientific missions organized by...
In my talk, I will discuss the hitherto unstudied Hebrew transmission of the Theorica Planetarum, which was translated in the middle of the fifteenth century by the Italian Jewish physician and polymath Judah Astruc ben Samuel Shalom Ha-Rofe. I shall focus on a beautiful copy from 1492 Naples, part of a rich collection of astronomical and mathematical treatises (Biblioteca nazionale Vittorio...
When we think of Florence and its rich history, we think about the Medici family. This Mugellan-born family had shaped significantly the world they lived in, using patronage as a weapon for both political and economical purposes, leaving a considerable mark within Florence.
Despite knowing a lot about their arts patronage and how they had shaped significantly the Renaissance, we know few of...
At the turn of the 18th century, as a result of the development of musical instruments, the increase in the size of orchestras and the diffusion of music on European scale, the need to standardize the frequencies associated with notes began to be felt. This was a not easy task because there were no instruments to measure the frequency of a sound and standardization was essentially left to the...
In 1894 Pierre Curie introduced into theoretical physics the first symmetry laws; they concern symmetry breaking. But the content of his paper remained longtime obscure.
Previous my papers showed that 1) the same word “symmetry” is a double negation without a corresponding affirmative word; that means the failure of the double negation law; hence, this word belongs to intuitionist logic; 2)...
The Seminary of Bergamo, founded in 1567, preserves a collection of around 200 instruments generally in a good state of conservation, most of which date back to the nineteenth century. The instruments were used for teaching Physics in the Seminary school, whose system in the 18th and 19th centuries was divided into Gymnasium, Philosophical and Theological studies.
Physics, in particular, was...
In 2004 and 2012, with the last pair of Venus transits across the Sun, there was a renewed interest in the history of this rare astronomical phenomenon. However, not enough attention was paid to the transits of 1874 and 1882, even though, in 1869, they had been described as “the greatest astronomical event of the century”. Indeed, the two transits of the 19th century represent one of the...
The friendship between Giuseppe Lorenzoni (1843-1914) and Antonio Abetti (1846-1928) represents one of the most important and enduring relationships in Italian astronomy of the late 19th century. Although they were almost the same age, Abetti always regarded Lorenzoni as his Master, a respect that did not prevent the development of a fruitful scientific collaboration between them. The...
Starting in 1881, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli dedicated himself to the observation of the planet Mercury. Contradicting the results of previous astronomers, who had assigned Mercury a rotation period similar to that of the Earth, Schiaparelli came to the conclusion that the planet's rotation period coincided with the period of its revolution around the Sun; in other words, Schiaparelli...
The aurora borealis, a name Galileo used for the first time to describe the spectacular luminous phenomenon caused by the collision of electrically charged particles from the Sun and gaseous particles in the Earth's atmosphere, has always fascinated scientists for their multiple shapes and colors. Generally, the auroras are visible in the circumpolar areas at high latitudes, but when solar...
The director of Padua's Specola from 1878 to 1913, Giuseppe Lorenzoni (1843-1914) became a "full member" of the Italian geodetic commission in June 1873. His meticulous archives allow us to reconstruct the participation of the Regno d’Italia in the operations of "measuring of the European degrees".
What did "geodesic practice" consist of in the second half of the 19th Century?
In this...
Between 1782 and 1794, the London workshop of Swiss-born watchmaker Josiah Emery manufactured some forty pocket chronometers equipped with the lever escapement designed by Thomas Mudge. According to contemporaries, these watches were the most accurate on the market. Although they were the result of technical research that accompanied the emergence of marine chronometry in the second half of...
Through the analysis of an unpublished manuscript, “History of the Italian Society of Sciences residing in Modena” conserved in Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, written by the librarian Antonio Lombardi (1768-1847), we propose to remember the Society history for the period in which it was based in the capital of the Estense Duchy, having Modena professors as presidents. The Society,...
