Author: Antigone Marino

The editorial committee of EuroPhysics News (EPN) has finally returned to meeting in person, after a long hiatus due to the global Covid emergency. On 6th October, its annual meeting was hosted by the Enrico Fermi Research Center (CREF) in Rome, thanks to the CREF President Luciano Pietronero and Miriam Focaccia, Coordinator of the Enrico Fermi Museum. In 2012, Luisa Cifarelli as President of the European Physical Society, and CREF as well, proclaimed the goldfish fountain, located in the courtyard of the Institute, an EPS Historic Site.

The EPN committee had the pleasure to visit the museum dedicated to the Italian Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi. This was founded to preserve and disseminate the memory of the Italian scientist, defined as “the last man who knew everything” for his contributions to twentieth-century physics both as a theorist and as an experimentalist. The Museum itinerary was presented for the first time in 2015 at the Genoa Science Festival and installed permanently on the ground floor of the historic building of via Panisperna at the end of 2019. The building itself is an integral part of the museum itinerary. In the 1930s, this was the “Regio Istituto Fisico”, and Enrico Fermi and his collaborators conducted their experiments and research here. Eventually the discoveries on radioactivity induced by neutrons earned the scientist the Nobel Prize in 1938.

Combining traditional objects and panels with modern multimedia technologies, the installations allow visitors to retrace how the exploration of matter has intertwined with the historical events of the twentieth century. From beta decay to cosmic rays, from the first nuclear fission to the construction of the bomb in the Los Alamos laboratories, the story of the research begun by a group of ragazzi in via Panisperna can’t be separated from the events that changed the 20th century.

The meeting between the CREF staff and the EPN editorial board demonstrates once again how returning to meeting in person favours cultural exchange, contamination, and dissemination. Indispensable ingredients in scientific research.

More info

• CREF museum
• Fermi "goldfish" fountain as EPS Historic Site
• Subscribe to EPN

The EPN advisory board on the iconic staircase of the Enrico Fermi Research Center.
Last woman on the right, Miriam Focaccia, director of the E. Fermi Museum.
image credit: Antigone Marino

image credit: University of Basel

22nd September 2023, University of Basel
Original publication: Website of the Swiss Physical Society

The event is intended to honor Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782, a member of the world-renowned Bernoulli family of mathematicians and scientists that had been based in Basel since 1623), especially for his role in the development of physics in Switzerland, Europe, and the world, by making the original site of his research in Basel, the Physics Cabinet in the Stachelschützenhaus, an EPS Historic Site.

Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782) studied initially medicine in Basel, Heidelberg, and Strasbourg, concluding with a thesis on respiration (containing experimental and mathematical approaches). During his scientific life he worked across many disciplines (with a focus on physics and its mathematical foundations). In 1725 he was appointed to the St. Petersburg Academy. In 1726 Leonhard Euler followed him to St. Petersburg. Later on Bernoulli intended to return to Basel for a chair in physics. But only after a vacancy in 1733 he was first successful in obtaining a professorship in anatomy and botany, being offered finally a professorship in physics in 1750. He then taught physics until 1776.

His most comprehensive work, the "Hydrodynamica" of 1733/1738 achieved a fundamental advance in hydrodynamics and laid the foundation for later progress, which included the well-known "Bernoulli Principle", relating the speed of a fluid to its potential energy. He published 74 papers and won a total of 10 Grand Paris Academy Prizes for topics in astronomy, physics, and applications to nautical problems. He was a pioneer in the development of mathematical physics by using the powerful calculus of Leibniz in Newton’s theories.

Bernoulli's predecessor as professor of physics at the University of Basel, Benedict Staehelin (1695-1750), had started a collection of physics devices and instruments that he had acquired for demonstration purposes. These pieces were set up in the 'Physics Cabinet' (the south wing of the "Stachelschützenhaus", built in 1729). Bernoulli added many more apparatuses for his research and lectures on physics – among them the experiment for the "Demonstration of the Hydrostatic Paradox" – which demonstrates that the pressure in a liquid is independent of the shape of the vessel and depends only on the height of the liquid column. Bernoulli had thus significantly expanded the collection of Basel's 'Physics Cabinet'.

While the "Stachelschützenhaus" has later been used by various other University Institutes (presently it hosts the Clinical Virology), it was the place, where Daniel Bernoulli worked for a quarter of a century, undertook research and gave his public experimental physics lectures that enjoyed great popularity. For this reason the EPS has accepted our proposal to make the "Stachelschützenhaus" an EPS Historic Site. The inauguration will take place on 22nd September 2023.

Organisation: Philipp Treutlein, Chair of the Physics Department, Ernst Meyer, President Platform MAP/SCNAT, Friedrich-Karl Thielemann, Prof. emer.

Overview of the program

The European Physical Society has awarded Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory with an EPS Historic Site as an acknowledgment of the observatory’s long-term work. Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory is the first EPS Historic site in Finland. The President of EPS Luc Bergé revealed the award in Sodankylä on Thursday 8^th December.

Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory was founded in 1913 by The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters to perform long-term geophysical observations, study changing geo- and space environments, and coordinate international space projects in Finland. When the Observatory was established, it was one of the first observatories north of the Arctic circle. The longest data set is over 100 years long (since 1914), including measurements of fluctuations in the geomagnetic field.

Today, the Observatory is an independent research organization within the University of Oulu having a wide range of national and international duties. These include ongoing geomagnetic observations and world-class space and arctic situational awareness and research capabilities. The Observatory has dedicated instruments in over twenty measurement locations from Svalbard to Antarctica.

“Observatories are a society’s long-term memory and the backbone for national contingency planning. Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory has an important role in observational space- and geoscience, in understanding the reasons for the fast changes of the Arctic polar area and in the long-term monitoring of natural hazards of the space- and geoenvironments” says the Director of the observatory, Professor Eija Tanskanen.

More information:

• https://www.oulu.fi/en/university/sodankyla-geophysical-observatory
• www.sgo.fi

Luc Bergé presenting the EPS Historic Site plaquette to the director and the vice-director of the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, Eija Tanskanen and Tero Raita
Photo credit: Mikko Orispää

Author: Andrius Juodagalvis, Lithuanian Physical Society

On 2nd July 2022, Lithuanian enthusiasts of history of physics gathered in Žeimelis, Lithuania, where the first EPS Historic Site in the three Baltic states was inaugurated. Having reviewed contributions of Theodor von Grotthuss (1785-1822), a scientist who lived in the region in the beginning of the XIX century, the EPS Historic Sites committee agreed that his laboratory in Gedučiai, near a small town of Žeimelis, has influenced the development of physics to a comparable extent as other scientific centres in Europe.

Theodor von Grotthuss work gained world-wide recognition in 1806, after he published an article on his theory of electrolysis of water, proposing to base the electrolysis process interpretation on physical-chemical phenomena. In his view, the electric field was polarizing molecules in a solution, and continuous dissociation and recombination of molecules resulted in the electrolysis effects visible only at the electrodes, where the chain of pairs was broken. Since 1808 he worked in a laboratory at his mother's estate in Gedučiai, which is currently a small village close to Žeimelis in Pakruojis municipality district, Lithuania. Electrolysis research was supplemented by various studies of interaction of light with matter, which included phosphorescence and photochemical reactions. Around 1817 he discovered regularities, that were later called the Grotthuss-Draper first and second laws of photochemistry. Attempting to create a unified concept of physical and chemical phenomena based on charge and molecular constituents, in 1818-1819 Teodor von Grotthuss concluded that interaction of opposite charges (positive and negative), depending on conditions, manifests as light, heat, and electricity. The same publication also proposed that water liquid contains molecules and their elementary parts even in the absence of an external electric field. The collective action of molecules that leads to the electric conductivity of solutions due to proton jumping from one molecule to another is still called the Grotthuss mechanism.

The EPS Historic Site sign was placed in a central square of Žeimelis, where the statue of Teodor von Grotthuss by a sculptor Kęstutis Balčiūnas was erected earlier this year, in March. The recognition ceremony in Žeimelis was opened by the chair of the EPS Historic Sites Committee, Karl Grandin. His speech was translated into Lithuanian by a scientific secretary of the Lithuanian Physical Society, Andrius Juodagalvis. The chairman of the EPS selection committee for historic sites congratulated the participants who witnessed inauguration of the first EPS historic site in the three Baltic states. He also explained the meaning of distinction as "a historic site," and highlighted Teodor von Grotthuss' achievements that contributed towards his recognition by physicists, and challenged chemists to weigh his influence, since his research topics are on the borderline between physics and chemistry. Had the Nobel Prizes been awarded when Grotthuss lived, he might have been awarded one. Karl Grandin also gifted the local museum with a copy of the last Theodor von Grotthuss' letter to his colleague in Sweden, Jacob Berzelius. The president of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Jūras Banys cherished that a small town of Žeimelis joined the league of other famous places in Europe, where the foundations of modern physics were laid. Other speakers of the official ceremony were the president of the Grotthuss' Foundation at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Aivaras Kareiva, the initiator of the EPS historic site application and a former president of the Lithuanian Physical Society, Juozas Vidmantis Vaitkus, the president of the Lithuanian Physics Teachers' Asociation, Rigonda Skorulskienė, the dean of the Faculty of Physics at Vilnius University, Juozas Šulskus, and the mayor of the Pakruojis municipality district Saulius Margis. At the end of the ceremony, Karl Grandin declared the EPS historic site in Žeimelis to be officially inaugurated. The entire ceremony was started and finalized with live saxophone melodies.

The Lithuanian Physical Society is grateful to the EPS Historic Site committee for recognition of Theodor von Grotthuss research results, and the Pakruojis district municipality for providing local support. Theodor von Grotthuss scientific contributions are described following the EPS historic site application written by J. V. Vaitkus and A. Kareiva, and an overview article by B. Jaselskis et al, Bull. Hist. Chem. 32 (2007) 119-128.

Official participants of the EPS Historic Site inauguration in Žeimelis, Pakruojis municipality district, Lithuania.
Photo by A. Skorulskas

More info

• Watch the inauguration on Lithuanian news programme Infostudija
  
• View the list of inaugurated EPS Historic Sites
  

The Ampère house and museum in Poleymieux near Lyon, France. Photo: Christian Barberon/Wikimedia Commons

Author: Alfonso San Miguel

Wednesday, October 6 2021, the Ampère Museum was inaugurated as an EPS Historic Site. This is the fifth site in France and it is dedicated to André-Marie Ampère.

The Ampère family home, where André-Marie spent his childhood and studied brilliantly with his father, had an exceptional destiny. The state of Poleymieux-au-Mont-d'Or (Rhône) where it is located, about fifteen kilometers from Lyon, was sequestered for the benefit of the Nation in 1793, when the French Revolution condemned the future scientist's father to death. Restored to the family two years later, it fell to Ampère in 1812, after the death of his mother. He relinquished it ten years later when he settled permanently in Paris.

André-Marie Ampère spent a very large part of his childhood and youth in this house, soon after his birth in 1775 until he was 29 years old. Without attending school, he read Diderot’s Encyclopedia and learned to scrutinize Nature and to understand the mathematics, physics and chemistry of his time. It was during this period that emerged his first ideas about the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Few years later, in 1820 he established the first mathematical relationships between these two physical phenomena. By giving the name of Ampère to the international unit of electrical current, the whole world saluted his fundamental discoveries, which gave rise to electrodynamics.

It took a century for the Poleymieux estate to regain the memory of its prestigious former owner. It was on the advice of Paul Janet, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, that two wealthy American industrialists, Hernand and Sosthène Behn, bought the estate in 1928. They donated the estate to the French Society of Electricians (SEE), which entrusted it to the Society of the Friends of André-Marie Ampère (SAAMA), an association created to manage and develop a Museum of Electricity and to perpetuate the memory of the illustrious Lyon native.  The Museum of Electricity was inaugurated on 1st July 1931.

The EPS Historic Site ceremony, which was part of the "Ampère 200 ans" (Ampère 200 years) programme of commemorations for the bicentenary of André-Marie Ampère's discoveries in electrodynamics, was sponsored by Serge Haroche, 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics. In the morning, Serge Haroche gave a lecture at the University of Sciences of Lyon  to more than 400 participants on the history of light. He highlighted the importance of André-Marie Ampère's discoveries in the unification of electricity, magnetism and optics. At the end of the day, the ceremony continued at the Ampère Museum where the commemorative plaque was unveiled by Serge Haroche and Luc Bergé in front of a hundred people, representatives of the academic world of Lyon, the electricity industry and learned societies. The ceremony was conducted together by François Gerin, president of the SEE, who also read a message from Gérard Mourou, 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics and sponsor of “Ampère 200 ans”, and by the President of the Society of the Friends of André-Marie Ampère, Alfonso San Miguel, who nominated the site.

FLTR: Guy Wormser (SFP), François Gerin (SEE), Serge Haroche, Luc Bergé (EPS), Gabriel Fioni (representative of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research),
Corinne Cardona (major of Poleymieux) and Alfonso San Miguel (SAAMA and SFP) - Photo: Alfonso San Miguel