The Physical Tourist

Abstract.

I provide a tour of Madrid, focusing especially on physical institutions that were created during the 19th and 20th centuries.These include the Astronomical Observatory close to the Prado Museum, which itself was conceived as a home for the Royal Academy of Sciences but became instead a world-famous art museum in 1819, leaving the Royal Academy of Sciences without a permanent home until 1866.The Laboratory of Physical Researches was created in 1910, and under the direction of Blas Cabrera (1878–1945), who also held a professorship at the Universidad Central, it fostered most of the Spanish research in physics at the time, in particular the famous spectroscopic researches of Miguel A. Catalán (1894–1957). Nearby were the so-called Transatlantico building and the Students’ Residence where Albert Einstein (1879–1955), for example, lectured in 1923, and which together continue to serve as a major cultural center in Madrid. Later, the physical laboratory was replaced by the National Institute of Physics and Chemistry, which was constructed with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and inaugurated in 1932. A new University City with its Faculty of Sciences also was constructed on the northwestern outskirts of Madrid, but almost all of its buildings were totally destroyed during the devastating Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. It was reconstructed after the war and became home, for example, to Spain’s first nuclear reactor, which achieved criticality in 1958.