Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 285 24 Rebuilding the Glory of Italy

At the Silesia Railway Station in Berlin, I heard Einstein once mention that a conference would be held in Italy early next year, but he didn't take it seriously at the time and didn't take it to heart at all.

Now hearing Kapitsa mention this matter again, and thinking about what Einstein said, he captured three pieces of useful information from the words of the two people.

[Next year], a [Physicists Conference] will be held in [Italy].

Next year, 1927.

The Solvay Conference is held every three years, and the last Fourth Solvay Conference was held in 1924.

In other words, the fifth Solvay Conference will be held in 1927, when the world's leading physicists will gather in Brussels to discuss today's cutting-edge issues in physics in a few days.

The problem lies here. The late Solvay was a Belgian himself, so the physics conferences organized with the money from the foundation he founded were always located in Brussels, the capital of Belgium.

This foundation was so rich that it built a "Palais Solvay" in Brussels to serve as a venue for conferences.

But I have never heard of Italians being keen on convening physics conferences.

Especially a few years ago, after the country's supreme head of state became that bald man, Italy implemented legalism nationwide even earlier than Germany.

If Chen Muwu had not returned to China and the invitation letter for this conference was sent directly to him, then he felt that he would definitely refuse to participate.

But now that Kapitsa has signed up for himself first, Chen Muwu thinks that he should first find out what the meeting is about, and then think about what to do.

"Peter, what's going on with this meeting? Why am I completely unaware of this?"

"Chen, don't tell me you're weird, I just received the notification not long ago. The Italian organizer said that they wanted to commemorate the [-]th anniversary of the death of the great Italian physicist Volta, so they wanted to hold such a conference."

Volta, literally translated into Chinese, is Volta.

This name may be unfamiliar to people, but Volta has another more well-known conventional translation method, and that is Volta.

Alessandro Volta, the inventor of the Voltaic pile, a pioneer in modern electrical research, a great Italian physicist from the [-]th to [-]th centuries.

In order to commemorate his pioneering achievements in the field of electricity, people named the standard unit of physical quantities such as voltage and potential difference the volt.

There is still a difference between the name Volta and the physical unit Volt.

The former is written Volta, while the latter removes the last a in the name and becomes volt.

It has always been a habit in physics to name the units of various physical quantities after great physicists in history.

But in the [-]th century, when units were named after physicists, a bad trend suddenly emerged, which was to delete the names of these great people to a certain extent.

It’s not just that volta deleted the a and became volt.

The standard unit of capacitance, Farad, is not the abbreviation of the name of the great experimental physicist Faraday, but has also been deleted like the volt, from Faraday to farad.

In addition, there is also the unit of viscosity, Poise, which comes from Poiseuille, the French physiologist who invented the mercury sphygmomanometer;

Rayl, the unit of specific acoustic impedance, comes from Rayleigh, the knighthood of Rayleigh III, Thomson's teacher.

Etc., etc……

However, there is another way to say why volta is changed to volt when making the unit of electric potential difference:
It's because in Italian, volta means "times".
1 volt, 2 volt, 3 volt
The corresponding is once, twice, three times...

In order to prevent this misunderstanding, Volta was changed to Volt.

But I guess this is another unofficial statement, because the two people who originally suggested using volts as the unit were British electrical engineers, and they didn't care how Italians read it.

Moreover, what these two electrical engineers suggested in 1861 was to use the volt as the unit of resistance. It was not until 20 years later that the volt was changed to the unit of voltage.

As the birthplace of the Renaissance movement that changed the destiny of Europe, great Italy not only has many great left-backs, but also many great physicists.

Not to mention omniscient and omnipotent talents like Leonardo da Vinci, but when it comes to the founder of physics and the greatest physicist in the world in the pre-Newtonian era, Galileo must not be bypassed.

In addition to Galileo, there was also Galileo's student Evangelista Torricelli who first discovered a vacuum in a column of mercury.

Then there is Amodio Avogadro, who proposed the concept of molecules and the difference between atoms and molecules. Avogadro's law and Avogadro's constant are named after his surname.

Around the same time as Avogadro, there were also several masters studying electricity in Italy.

The first was Luigi Galvani, a surgeon and professor of physics at the University of Bologna. When he was dissecting a dead frog, he accidentally touched the frog's legs on an iron plate with a copper scalpel.

The frog's legs curled up suddenly, as if an electric current was passing through it.

Since then, Galvani has gone further and further down the wrong path of "animal electricity", using the control variable method to try to use iron screen windows in different environments such as sunny days, cloudy days and rainy days, and at different times of the day. , copper wire, iron plate, glass, rubber, rosin, stone, wooden board and other different materials were tested on the frog legs, trying to find out the truth about the generation of electric current.

Galvani's mistake was sad for himself, but it made a great contribution to the development of physics as a whole.

Without Galvani’s large number of experimental phenomena and data, more people would not be attracted to electrical phenomena, and his competitor Volta would not have proposed a new perspective different from “animal electricity”. Metallic Electricity” and eventually developed the electric stack.

Although the two men held different academic views, in order to commemorate Galvani's pioneering work in electricity, Volta named the electric pile he developed the Galvani pile.

He did not expect that later generations would rename this thing a voltaic pile in memory of him.

Although Volta had successfully developed an electric pile, Galvani's idea of ​​animal electricity was not followed by anyone.

Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini succeeded his uncle as professor of physics at the University of Bologna after Galvani retired due to ill health.

Although Volta had already produced an electric pile that could generate electric current at that time, it proved that his uncle's "animal electricity" theory was wrong and that "metallic electricity" was the correct physical principle.

But Aldini took a different approach. He no longer stubbornly adhered to his uncle's wrong theory, but instead focused on another issue.

Since electric current can cause the legs of dead frogs to twitch, can this technology be applied to other animals?

So Aldini tried various animals larger than frogs, such as sheep, pigs, cows and oxen, using electric shocks to the head to cause convulsive movements of the eyes and tongue.

After testing various animals, Aldini still felt that it was not enough, so he came up with a bold idea.

Since animal carcasses are OK, then are human carcasses also OK?So Aldini began to use his identity as a professor at the University of Bologna to enter the execution ground and conduct experiments on the corpses of prisoners who had just been executed, and achieved good results.

After achieving initial results on the human body, Aldini's ideas became more and more bold, since electric current can cause spasms in the human body and allow the eyeballs and tongue to move again.

So can a large enough current bring a person back to life?

Aldini wanted to use experiments to prove whether his idea was right or wrong, but unfortunately, he could not do this experiment in Bologna.

Because of the great man Napoleon sent from heaven, Northern Italy at that time had become the sphere of influence of the French.

In the Bologna area, and even throughout the European continent, prisoners were executed either with the noble and novel guillotine improved by Louis XVI, or with brutal beheading.

This method of execution was very unfriendly to Aldini.

If the human capital is separated, no matter how high the current is applied, it will definitely not be resurrected!

So Aldini set his sights on Britain, across the English Channel, the closest country where hangings were still being carried out.

The man's mobility was so great that he moved to London immediately after having the idea.

In London, Aldini soon found the right man, a convict accused of harming his wife and daughter, George Forster.

After the prisoner was sentenced to death by hanging, Aldini, in front of a group of doctors and onlookers, used a giant voltaic pile composed of 100 zinc and copper sheets to insert the positive and negative poles into the corpse's body. mouth and ears.

"The jaw began to tremble, the surrounding muscles showed horrifying twists, and his left eye actually opened."

After moving one of the electrodes to the rectum, it was discovered that the movements became more obvious. "The prisoner's right hand was raised and clenched, and his legs and feet also moved" so that he appeared to be waking up and starting to breathe again.

There was no Internet, no television, and no radio. The British in the early [-]th century lived a very boring life, so they would not give up any fun.

The onlookers at the scene spread the word, and the news and newspapers reported the matter wildly. The British began to spread the rumor that Aldini was an Italian who had mastered the black technology of resurrecting people with electricity. "Fire, Thunder God helps me", "If you follow me, you will follow electricity".

A little girl, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then five years old, was also deeply shocked by this incident.

Later, she married a poet in 1816 and changed her surname to Shelley after her husband. Two years later, she published a novel, "Frankenstein", which was inspired by Aldini's electrocution of a corpse.

Because of this novel, Mary Shelley is known as the mother of science fiction.

Her husband is of course not an ordinary poet, but Percy Bysshe Shelley, who is known as the "poet's poet". The most well-known is the line in his work "Ode to the West Wind", "If Winter is here, can spring be far behind?"

Physics and literature are connected because of such a ridiculous thing.

Although physics in Italy began to decline from the mid-[-]th century, there were so many famous physicists in the country's history.

But I haven’t seen them hold commemorative events for the 150th anniversary of Avogadro’s birth or the [-]th anniversary of his death this year. Why do they suddenly start commemorating them next year?

Could it be that some great figure has awakened in the Italian academic circle and is determined to restore the glory of Italy? It is our duty to do so?

Who is this man? Is it Guglielmo Marconi, who made a lot of money from his patent for wireless telegraphy, or the last glory of Italian physics, Enrico Fermi?
Chen Muwu thought for a long time and could only think of the two most famous Italians in the world today who have made achievements in physics or will make achievements in physics.

The former is already famous all over the world, and the latter, uh, was supposed to have Fermi-Dirac statistics, but Chen Muwu interfered. Now he is probably just a theoretical physics professor at the University of Rome.

Although Chen Muwu couldn't understand why Italy suddenly held a conference of physicists.

But speaking of it, there is really some connection with him behind this incident.

It was neither Marconi nor Fermi who wanted to revive the glory of Italian physics, but the bald man mentioned above who had just come to power a few years ago.

Chen Muwu's journey back home, various things that happened when he passed through various countries, including his speech when he visited Soviet Union, the dilemma he encountered when going through customs in Poland, and the warm welcome he received when he visited the University of Berlin.

These things are always regarded as scientific news and published in newspapers as soon as possible.

There was Einstein before him and Chen Muwu after him. These two people can be regarded as the most popular fried chickens in the scientific world today.

Baldhead never thought that a small physicist would have such a big influence.

Facing Chen Muwu, the Swedish crown prince wondered whether he could use his power to improve his country's physics level.

But what the bald man is thinking is, since physics has such a great influence, should he hold a physics conference in his own country, so as to enhance the country's prestige and enhance national pride?

But there always needs to be a reason for holding a meeting.

Since modern times, Italian physics has declined, so we can only look to our ancestors for solutions.

Avogadro, who happened to be born in 1776 and died in 1856, is a good candidate. Just as Chen Muwu thought, this year 1926 is not only the 150th anniversary of his birth, but also the 70th anniversary of his death.

It's a pity that Avogadro's birth and death months are all in the summer. When the bald man came up with this idea, the corresponding anniversary had already passed.

There is no choice but to give up on this great man and look for the next target.

So Volta became a better candidate than Avogadro. He happened to die in 1827, and next year 1927 happens to be the 100th anniversary. This is a 150th anniversary compared to the 70th anniversary, and it is more commemorative.

Because it was to commemorate Volta, the venue for the meeting was Como, Volta’s hometown.

Lake Como here is a resort at the foot of the Alps.

Of course, it was also the place where Baldhead was finally shot, but he didn't know it yet.

Chen Muwu and Kapitsa were chatting next to their luggage. The Cambridgeshire postman rode his bicycle to the door of Trinity College and unloaded a package of letters and telegrams that belonged here.

After checking all the recipients, the supervisor said loudly to them: "Academician Chen, I have a telegram from you."

"Where is it?"

"Rome……"

These Italians are really fast. As soon as Kapitsa agreed to attend the meeting for himself, they sent another telegram?
Unexpectedly, the Chancellor’s words included the second part: “Well, it’s not the Rome in Italy, but the one in the Papal States.”

(End of this chapter)