Giulio Cesare Lagalla

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Giulio Cesare Lagalla (* 1576 in Padula ; † 1624 ) was an Italian professor of philosophy . (His name is often given as Julius Caesar Lagalla or Giulio Cesare La Galla.)

He was born in Padua, which at that time belonged to the Kingdom of Naples . Lagalla was trained in philosophy and medicine. He became the official doctor of the papal galleys for some time and then went to Rome to give lectures on natural philosophy at the Collegio Romano . He quickly developed into the city's leading peripatetic and was one of the opponents of the heliocentric Copernican worldview.

As a result of Galileo Galilei's observations of the moon with the help of a telescope , which were published in Sidereus Nuncius , Lagalla published a reply. He had attended Galileo's demonstrations of the telescope and was not one of those who questioned the capabilities of the instrument. However, he doubted Galileo's three-dimensional representation of the moon as it was based on two-dimensional visual observations. Lagalla created the first drawing of the moon on the basis of telescopic observations, which is considered lost.

In his book De Phenomenis in Orbe Lunae , which he published in Venice in 1612 , he denied the possibility that an untreated stone could emit light through calcination (the expulsion of volatile substances through heating). This stone, known as the " lapis solaris ", was shown to him by Galileo Galilei. We now know that the "Bolognese light stone" was a piece of barite (barium sulfate).

In 1935 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to name the Lagalla crater on the moon after him.

bibliography

  • De luce et lumine altera disputatio
  • De phaenomenis in orbe lunae novi telescopii usu nunc iterum suscitatis, Venice 1612.
  • De Immortalitate Animorum Ex Aristot. sententia, Rome 1621

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