Accademia del Cimento

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The Accademia del Cimento (= Academy of Experiments) was an academy for experimental physics and an early scientific society.

History and organization

The Accademia was founded and financed in 1657 by the Medici family by Cardinal Leopoldo de 'Medici , who was very interested in science, and his brother, Grand Duke Ferdinando II. De' Medici .

Tribuna Galilei in La Specola in Florence

The motto of the academy was Provando e Riprovando (= through trying and trying again) and the aim was to study nature through reproducible experiments. One dealt not only with physics (including vacuum, barometer, hygrometer, thermometer, pendulum for time measurement), but also with medicine and biology and chemistry. Most of the members were students or followers of Galileo Galilei , such as the famous Vincenzo Viviani . The group met in Leopold's private apartments in the Palazzo Pitti .

The members of the academy studied the works of Plato , Democritus , Aristotle , Robert Boyle and Pierre Gassendi and were the first to confirm the identification of the rings of Saturn by Christian Huygens (Galileo had already seen them, but not recognized them as rings).

The Accademia had no formal statutes and was only loosely organized, there were no regular dates for its meetings.

The group existed for about ten years until 1667 and then disbanded, among other things due to the departure of members and internal disputes, without ever being officially closed. The negotiations they published with the description of their experiments, first published as Saggi di naturali esperienze 1667, but reissued and translated long afterwards, were influential for the further development of the experimental method in the natural sciences and even became a laboratory manual of the 18th century designated. Most of the experiments came from the early years of society. In the following years the book was revised several times. The Saggi are the only surviving publication and were submitted to the Pope and the Vatican for censorship by the Medici, who had become cautious during the trial of Galileo (1632) . It is probably due to Leopoldo de 'Medici's caution that the theory behind the experiments is hardly dealt with and astronomy is missing.

Experiments

The first group of experiments in the Saggi concerns air pressure measurement with mercury barometers, the second group vacuum experiments according to Robert Boyle, the third artificial cooling and the fourth group cooling in nature. The fifth group considers the influence of heat and cold on various objects, the sixth compressibility of water, the seventh showed that, contrary to Aristotle's view, no fire arises in a vacuum. The eighth group deals with magnetism and the ninth with amber (static electricity). The tenth group is about colors and the eleventh is about the speed of sound. In the twelfth group, the laws of fall of Galileo are described, but without experiment.

The instruments, some of which were specially built by the group, are preserved in the Museum of the History of Science (La Specola) in Florence.

Members

Permanent members were:

  • Prince Leopoldo de 'Medici, brother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany
  • Ferdinando II de 'Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany
  • Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679) - physicist and mathematician, leading member of the academy alongside Viviani.
  • Francesco Redi (1626–1697) - physician, from 1666 the Grand Duke's first doctor. He undertook experiments that showed the multiplication of flies via maggots in meat (published in a book in 1668, there was also a dispute with Kircher about it). He continued this in studying parasites (such as the horsefly).
  • Carlo Renaldini (1615–1698) - nobleman from Ancona . Mathematician, meteorologist and philosopher, military engineer, from 1644 lecturer in philosophy in Pisa and from 1667 professor of philosophy in Padua, who was the first to give lectures on Galileo there, but was also caught up in Aristotelian ideas. He was one of the most active members and studied, among other things, heat convection and made astronomical observations. He was in conflict with Borelli. Renaldini taught Prince Cosimo III,
  • Vincenzo Viviani - famous physicist and mathematician and one of the most prominent members of the Academy, a student of Galileo, also worked as a senior engineer in hydraulic engineering in Florence.
  • Lorenzo Magalotti (1637–1712), secretary of the Academy from 1660 and responsible for the publication of the Saggi
  • Alessandro Marsili (1601–1670), from Siena, where he was a lecturer in logic. From 1638 philosophy professor in Pisa, a position he probably owed to the fact that Galileo praised him (he met Galileo in Siena after his trial). He was not very much appreciated by the other members and was a follower of Aristotle. He proposed an experiment on the nature of the vacuum in the mercury barometer according to Evangelista Torricelli (one was not sure whether it contained vapors, see Void in Void ).
  • Carlo Roberto Dati (1619–1676), student of Galileo, secretary of the Accademia della Crusca , wrote about Tuscan
  • Antonio Oliva (1624–1689), originally a clergyman, was imprisoned in the castle of Reggio Calabria until 1652 for participating in uprisings against the Spaniards in 1647/48 and then lived in Florence. From 1663 to 1667 professor of theoretical medicine in Pisa. From 1667 in Rome, where he was imprisoned and charged by the Inquisition for membership in the Accademia dei Bianchi. He then lunged out of a window to avoid torture. He dealt with hydraulics and mathematics (a commentary on the 5th book of Euclid's elements has survived).
  • Candido del Buono (1618–1676), priest in Florence (chaplain at the Hospital S. Maria Nuova), brother of Paolo. Like this one active in the academy, inventor of several instruments (including a system called Arcicanna for improving telescopes)
  • Alessandro Segni (1625–1659), diplomat, secretary of the Accademia until 1660 when Magalotti replaced him. He made no contributions and was initially secretary because he was head of the secretariat of Cardinal Leopold de Medici.

Corresponding members:

The area also included:

Publications

  • Saggi di Naturali Esperienze fatte nell'Accademia del Cimento sotto la protezione del Serenissimo Principe Leopoldo di Toscana e descritte dal segretario Lorenzo Magalotti , printed in 1667 by Cecchi in Florence and 1714 in Naples by Raillard.
The main research results of the academy were published in the anthology.
The work was printed in English translation in 1684 by Alsop in London and in 1731 in Dutch translation by J. and H. Verbeek in Leiden. A Latin translation also appeared in 1731.
For the third Riunione degli scienziati italiani in Florence in 1841, Grand Duke Leopold II had an edition made for the participants. ( Digitized version )
New edition 1976, Classici della società italiana, volume 10; an English translation appeared in the book by Middleton in 1971 (see literature).

literature

  • Luciano Boschiero Experiment and Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany: The History of the Accademia del Cimento , Springer Verlag 2007
  • WE Knowles Middleton The Experimenters: A Study of The Accademia del Cimento , Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press 1971
  • Giorgio Strano, Marco Beretta (Editor) The Accademia del Cimento and its European context , Watson Publishing 2009 (contributions by Rob Iliffe, Mordechai Feingold, Meli and others)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Martha Orenstein The role of scientific societies in the seventeenth century , University of Chicago Press 1913
  2. ↑ Reveron to Malpighi, Int. J. Morphology, 2011
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