Sanjiv singh
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Great Italians of the past: Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei is one of the personalities that have most marked the history of human knowledge. Not considered by chance the father of contemporary science, the great scholar was born in Pisa on February 15, 1564.
The first period of scientific achievements of the Tuscan physicist was spent in Padua, where he was appointed professor of mathematics at the University. It is in Padua that Galileo adhered everyday more convinced to the heliocentric theory by Copernicus, the Polish astronomer who was the first to conceive the Sun as fixed at the center of the Universe and the Solar System and the Earth moving around it, along with the other planets.
His conviction increased after reading Keplero's "Mysterium cosmographicum". So the genius from Pisa, after having designed experiments in this regard, formulates the "Law on the free fall of bodies", sensing a proportionality between speed and distance traveled by a falling object.
After the first discoveries in the field of mathematics and physics, he decided to direct its studies towards
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In the Footsteps of Galileo
Abstract
Italian scientific biopics experienced a period of extraordinary media hype in the 1970s, when some intellectuals personally committed to bringing the lives of the scientists of the past to television in order to discuss the relationship between knowledge and power in the present. Nevertheless, might we properly speak of “Italian-style” historical-scientific fictional drama? To answer this question, we will focus on Roberto Rossellini, Liliana Cavani and, above all, Lucio Lombardo Radice, a promoter, scientific consultant, author and presenter of, and sometimes even actor in, some of the most controversial of these scientific biopics. This article aims, first of all, to reconstruct this history, explaining the reasons for the success of the genre, starting in the 1960s, and the crisis it underwent in the 1980s; secondly, to ascertain the influences these ideological works exerted on choices, approaches and styles of the next generation of science historians and communicators.
1 Introduction: A Matter of Empathy
“At
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Introduction
Everyone must have learnt and recited this poem in school
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.”
Long before this poem was written, a man was born, and his
major invention is a reply to this poem. Probably he would recite
this poem as
“Twinkle twinkle little star, I no more wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high, still so close to my eye.”
Don’t you want to know who this person was and why I re-constructed the poem? He was Galileo Galilei, the man who invented the telescope. Scientists have been studying the sky at night since the beginning of time. They built huge structures and monuments that would line up with the stars at certain times of the year. These were their calendars and they followed the stars and the moon like clockwork.
It was Galileo Galilei who first peered at the stars through his tiny home-produced telescope. Since the invention of this amazing instrument scientists have
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