Perspectives on Scientific Prague

Pavia perspectives on scientific Prague FABIO BEVILACQUA Department of Physics « A.Volta », University of Pavia, Italy Abstract Both universities, today part of the Coimbra Group, were founded by Charles IV, King of the Roman Empire and King of Bohemia: Prague was first in 1348, Pavia followed shortly in 1361. In 1760 the Jesuit natural philosopher and polymath Ruggero Boscovich (1711–1787), who was to be professor of mathematics at Pavia University from 1764 to 1768, made plans to visit Prague. That could not happen during his long trip of 1761–1762 from Vienna to Constantinople to Warsaw and back to Vienna and Venice, but in the sixties some of his works were printed in Prague and among his correspondents we find the Jesuit Joseph Stepling (1716–1778), founder of the Prague observatory. Later in the sixties Boscovich founded the Brera Observatory in Milan. Today a crater of the moon is dedicated to Boscovich and an asteroid to Stepling. In Pavia we are celebrating the 300th anniversary of Boscovich’s birth with the presentation of the digital edition of his collected papers and correspondence, among these is the diary of his long trip to Constantinople. In 1784 Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) made a long trip towards Berlin with his colleague Antonio Scarpa (1752–1832), an anatomist. They spent some time in Prague and wrote about the visit. Volta, who had the enviable task of buying scientific apparatus without financial limits (“at my judgement”) ordered in Prague some special glass. Later on, in 1817, while the by now elderly Volta was head of faculty, the Austrian government, in order to reform Pavia University, which had been under French revolutionary rule for almost twenty years, gave as a model the regulations of Prague University. In 1895 the very young Albert Einstein (1879–1955) spent a year in Pavia, where his father and uncle had built and were running an electro-technical factory. There he became interested in electromagnetism and wrote his first scientific paper. At the time, the professor of Physics in Pavia was Adolfo Bartoli, who gave a thermodynamic derivation of radiation pressure (Maxwell had given an electromagnetic one). As is well known and celebrated in this Conference, in 1911 Einstein got a chair in theoretical physics in Prague. His successor, Philipp Frank, wrote a well-balanced biography about him with some interesting details