On Friday 9 July, after visiting the museum with their fellows, Calogero Monterosso, Jacopo Giaconi and Christian Buli, young academics of the Accademia Giovani per la Scienza (Youth Academy for Science), showed some of the experiments on floating bodies made by Galileo and Ludovico Delle Colombe using a watertight glass container, a parallelepiped and two thin wood plates.
A staunch defender of Aristotelian theories, Delle Colombe was in fact one of the opponents of Galileo's Discorso intorno alle cose che stanno in su l’acqua o che in quella si muovono. And it was Delle Colombe, at the beginning of the 17th century, who openly challenged the Tuscan scientist at the Medici court. The debate between the two scholars represented a fundamental fragment of the history of scientific thought.
The Accademia Giovani per la Scienza is an experimental project that offers a selected group of forty-one young students the opportunity to participate, for a period of at least two years, in high-profile training courses, creating opportunities to meet with the protagonists of scientific research and culture, in Italy and in Europe.
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Useful links (Italian only)Pdf resources
- Press release (in Italian)