Their names and faces swept across my mind, as old acquaintances. We have, indeed, met. On a library bookshelf, in a book, in a lesson, in a conversation, through a disciple of theirs, in the drafts scribbled and scattered all over my desk. Nights and days, months, years, decades, centuries of knowledge. Created, disregarded, recreated, denied, developed, accumulated, built upon, transmitted. Across time and geographies. Until reaching us. Until reaching me!
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who you probably know best by his pseudonym, Paracelsus. He learned from the monks, studied at my Alma Mater, Basel, traveled, also him in search for more. Crossing disciplines, medicine, alchemy, physics and astrology.
Galileo Galilei, who, from Pisa, Padua and Florence, saw much further away. He observed craters on the Moon, satellites orbiting around Jupiter and spots in the Sun. A sidereal messenger, Sidereus nuncius, as in the title of one of his works. And he saw differently, trying to put the Earth, and the earthly ones, in their proper place in the Universe, far from the center, despite the established system and beliefs.
Blaise Pascal, entangled in mathematics, in calculus, in the calculation of small parts. Theorizing about probabilities, seemingly because of some friends and some questions about games. Luck and bad luck, outcomes, gains and losses, the good and the optimal. Combining mechanics and calculus, in a new machine, La Pascaline. Continuing the works on pressure and vacuum, on Torricelli's wake.
Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A pioneer woman in this men’s world. The first woman ever to be invited to meetings at the Royal Society. Naturalism instead of mechanicism. Taking us to other worlds, to her Blazing World, a futuristic work of fiction with a woman as leading protagonist, the North Pole as a gate, talking animals and submarines.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who began by dedicating himself to the study of mathematics and physics, but whose interests and contributions are so vast that it is difficult to enlisted them all. You may not know that he also worked as a librarian, living among books, seeking to broaden collections, and to make them more orderly. Rationally, philosophically, he believed that this world of ours, created by the Master, is none but the best of all conceivable worlds that could have been created.
Maria Margarethe Winkelmann, Kirch by marriage, passionate about observation and astronomy, at a time when much of the study and science was not accessible to women. She discovered, herself, a comet, during the work with her husband, a reputed astronomer and mathematician. In his own words "Early in the morning the sky was clear and starry. Some nights before I had observed a variable star, and my wife wanted to find and see it for herself. In so doing she found a comet in the sky. At which time she woke me and I found that it was indeed a comet ... I was surprised that I had not seen it the night before.".
Fahrenheit. Daniel Gabriel. Between science and technology, physicist and creator. Developing, testing, perfecting. Shaping the glass, which he knew how to blow. Making instruments, seeking the rigour of measurements. Having become aware of works on the properties of mercury, he envisioned how to best measure temperature, replacing alcohol with this material, in thermometers.
Names, among many others, who came before these or along with them.
Names, to be followed by many more.
(to be continued)
On a journey, riding with Newton, a game of Nestore Mangone and Simone Luciani, Ediciones Mas que Oca (2018) under license of Cranio Creations.
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(*) In https://thelifeofmariawinkelmann.weebly.com/a-comet-is-discovered.html
References: Wikipedia.
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