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Physical Sciences in Lisbon

  • The Physical Tourist
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Abstract

We provide a two-day tour of Lisbon, Portugal, focusing on sites of scientific and technological importance, setting them within their historical contexts. On the first day we visit the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, the building that successively housed the College of Nobles, the Polytechnic School, and the University of Lisbon Faculty of Sciences, and then go on to the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Museum and the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon. On the second day we visit the Industrial Institute and Museum, the Geographical Society of Lisbon, the Jesuit College of Santo Antão, and the Technical Institute.

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Notes

  1. Museums are becoming more and more prominent in the Lisbon tourist profile. The Tile Museum, the Electricity Museum, the Water Museum, the Chemical Laboratory (at the Science Museum) cannot be missed. The Oceanarium is a must, and the Coach Museum is beautiful and attractive. On the Fine Arts side, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Ancient Art Museum, the Chiado Museum, the Berardo Collection (at the Centro Cultural de Belém), and the new Museum of the Orient are definitely worth visiting.

  2. Fernando Pessoa was a poet known by his various heteronyms, of which four stand out. In the context of our paper, we selected the heteronym Álvaro de Campos, an engineer and enthusiast for modern science and technology, although occasionally critical of them. Also noteworthy is that at about the time Pessoa wrote “Lisbon Revisited,” he also wrote a tourist guide entitled Lisbon. What the tourist should see (Lisboa: O que o Turista deve ver, 1925), in which he mentioned a number of the scientific sites we will visit, but not within their scientific contexts.

References

  1. Dieter Hoffmann, “Physics in Berlin: A Walk Through the Historical City Center,” Physics in Perspective 1 (1999), 445-454; idem, “Physics in Berlin: Walking tours in Charlottenburg and Dahlem and Excursions in the Vicinity of Berlin,” ibid. 2 (2000), 426-445; reprinted in John S. Rigden and Roger H. Stuewer, ed., The Physical Tourist: A Science Guide for the Traveler (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2009), pp. 81-90, 91-110.

  2. Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems. Edited and Translated by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 216-217.

  3. Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro, and Maria Paula Diogo, “Constructing Knowledge: Eighteenth-century Portugal and the New Sciences,” in Kostas Gavroglu, ed., “The Sciences in the European Periphery During the Enlightenment,” Archimedes, Vol. 2 (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 1-40; Ana Carneiro, Ana Simões, and Maria Paula Diogo, “Enlightenment Science in Portugal: The Estrangeirados and their Communication Networks,” Social Studies of Science 30 (2000), 591-619.

  4. Ana Simões, Maria Paula Diogo, and Ana Carneiro, Citizen of the World: A Scientific Biography of the Abbé Correia da Serra (Berkeley: University of California Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 2012).

  5. José Alberto Silva, A apropriação da filosofia natural em Teodoro de Almeida (1722-1804) (Braga: CIUHCT, 2009); José Alberto Silva, “The Portuguese Popularizer of Science Teodoro de Almeida: Agendas, Publics, and Bilingualism,” History of Science 50 (l) (2012), 93-122.

  6. Rómulo de Carvalho, História da Fundação do Colégio Real dos Nobres de Lisboa (1761-1772) (Coimbra: Atlântida Livraria Editora, 1959), p. 57.

  7. Ibid., pp. 137-142, on p. 139.

  8. Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro, Maria Paula Diogo, and Luís Miguel Carolino, “Da Escola Politécnica e da Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa. Construções identitárias e culturas científicas,” in Sérgio Campos de Matos and Jorge Ramos do Ó, ed., A Universidade de Lisboa (1834-2003) - da Revolução liberal à actualidade (in press); Júlia Gaspar and Ana Simões, “Physics on the Periphery: A Research School at the University of Lisbon under Salazar’s Dictatorship,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 41 (3) (2011), 303-343.

  9. Pedro M.P. Raposo, “Polity, Precision and the Stellar Heavens: the Royal Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon (1857-1910),” D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010; Pedro M.P. Raposo, “Observatório Astronómico de Lisboa: um Observatório Nacional na Universidade,” in Marta C. Lourenço and Maria João Neto, ed., Património da Universidade de Lisboa: Ciência e Arte (Lisboa: Tinta da China/Universidade de Lisboa, 2011), pp. 97-106; Elsa Mota, Paulo Crawford, and Ana Simões, “Einstein in Portugal: Eddington’s expedition to Principe and the reactions of Portuguese astronomers (1917-1925),” British Journal for the History of Science 42 (2009), 245-273.

  10. Pedro Raposo, “The Astronomer/Instrument Maker Campos Rodrigues and the Contribution of the Observatory of Lisbon for the 1900-1901 Solar Parallax Programme,” in Jose Afonso, Nuno Santos, Andre Moitinho, and Rui Agostinho, ed., 2005 Past Meets Present in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Proceedings of the 15th Portuguese National Meeting (New Jersey, London, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Chennai: World Scientific, 2006), pp. 97-100.

  11. Marina Silva and Rui J. Agostinho, “Time Service and Legal Time in Portugal,” in ibid., pp. 105-108.

  12. Mota, Crawford, and Simões, “Einstein in Portugal” (ref. 9), pp. 263-266.

  13. Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (ref. 2), pp. 153-160.

  14. Francisco da Fonseca Benevides, Catálogo das Collecções do Museu Technologico (Lisboa: Tip. Castro & Irmão, 1873), pp. IX-XII.

  15. Henrique Leitão, A ciência na “Aula da Esfera” no Colégio de Santo Antão, 1590-1759 (Lisboa: Comissariado Geral das Comemorações do V Centenário do Nascimento de São Francisco Xavier, 2007).

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Acknowledgment

We express our deepest gratitude to Roger H. Stuewer for his thorough linguistic revision.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Sciences/UL, CIUHCT-Interuniversity Center of History of Science and Technology, Edif. C4, Piso 3, Gabinete 15, Campo Grande, 1749-016, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ana Simões

  2. Faculty of Sciences and Technology/UNL, CIUHCT-Interuniversity Center of History of Science and Technology, Campus de Caparica, Ed. VII, Piso 2, 2829-516, Caparica, Portugal

    Maria Paula Diogo & Ana Carneiro

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  1. Ana Simões
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  2. Maria Paula Diogo
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  3. Ana Carneiro
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Correspondence to Ana Simões.

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Ana Simões (corresponding author) is a member of the Interuniversity Center of History of Science and Technology at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Maria Paula Diogo and Ana Carneiro are members of the Interuniversity Center of History of Science and Technology at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the New University of Lisbon.

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Simões, A., Diogo, M.P. & Carneiro, A. Physical Sciences in Lisbon. Phys. Perspect. 14, 335–367 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-012-0096-7

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