Related papers: Teaching physics during the 17th century: some exa…
What can physics students learn about science from those scientists who got the answers wrong? Students encounter little science history, and what they have encountered typically portrays scientists as The People with the Right Answers. But…
The evolution of Physics between the second half of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century is presented coupling art and science, in the framework of Ferrara. The main characters are Giuseppe Bongiovanni, Professor of…
Many instruments of the Historical Collection of the Physics Instruments of the University of Palermo date back to the early nineteenth century, when experimental Physics begun to be taught in university studies by using instruments and…
This is a translation from Latin to Portuguese of Euler's 'Attempt at a theory of the friction of fluids'. According to the records, a treatise by Euler with the title 'Tentamen theoriae de frictione fluidorum' was presented to the St.…
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli is commonly credited with performing the first precise experiments to determine the acceleration of a freely falling body. Riccioli has been discussed by historians of science, sometimes…
Claude Francis Milliet Dechales described the Coriolis effect in his 1674 Cursus seu Mundus Mathematicus. Dechales discussed and illustrated the deflection of both falling bodies and of projectiles launched toward the poles that should…
In 1651 the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) published in his encyclopedic work on astronomy, the Almagestum Novum, 77 arguments against the Copernican movement of the Earth. These arguments are often mentioned in…
In 1615 Paolo A. Foscarini, a Carmelite monk lived in a monastery of south Italy near Cosenza (Calabria), published a Trattato which, at variance to what was common at the time, has not been written in Latin, but in volgare, the ancient…
We report on theoretical courses by Fermi and Majorana, giving evidence of the first appearance and further development of Quantum Mechanics teaching in Italy. On the basis of original documents, we make a comparison between Fermi's and…
Plutarchus, circa 100 AD, in his early book on "astrophysics" --in which he exposed, in a sense, a general theory of gravitation-- wrote the noticeable passage: <<The Moon gets the guarantee of not falling down just from its motion and from…
Robert Grosseteste was one of the most prominent thinkers of the Thirteenth Century. Philosopher and scientist, he proposed a metaphysics based on the propagation of light. In this framework, he gave a cosmology too. Here we will discuss…
In his encyclopedic work on astronomy, the 1651 Almagestum Novum, the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) argued against the movement of the Earth on the grounds that (among other things), if the Earth rotated, that…
We point out that certain equations which, in a very recent paper written by E. Verlinde, are postulated as a starting point for a thermodynamical derivation of classical gravity, are actually consequences of a specific microscopic model of…
In 1927, just after he obtained a full professorship, Enrico Fermi delivered his first course on Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Physics in Rome. The following year Edoardo Amaldi, Emilio Segre' and Ettore Majorana became students…
The Giornata Sesta about the Force of Percussion is a relatively less known Chapter from the Galileo's masterpiece "Discourse about Two New Sciences". It was first published lately (1718), long after the first edition of the Two New…
This agile small "book" (in Italian) is an introduction to the life and work of Ettore Majorana, the brightest Italian theoretical physicist of the XX century, regarded by Enrico Fermi as the best theoretician of his time in the world. It…
It is curious to learn that Enrico Fermi knew how to base probabilistic inference on Bayes theorem, and that some influential notes on statistics for physicists stem from what the author calls elsewhere, but never in these notes, {\it the…
The following translation of Leonhard Euler's "Examination of an Artifice for Propelling a Ship by the Principle of Internal Motion," originally published in 1750, offers a glimpse into a fascinating historical debate in the field of…
The case-study teaching method has a long history (starting at least with Socrates), and wide current use in business schools, medical schools, law schools, and a variety of other disciplines. However, relatively little use is made of it in…
I present the theoretical evidence which suggests that gravity is an emergent phenomenon like gas dynamics or elasticity with the gravitational field equations having the same status as, say, the equations of fluid dynamics/elasticity. This…