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The Founder of the First Institute of Physics of the Milan University: Aldo Pontremoli, a Physicist’s Life Between Adventure and Institutions

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Abstract

Aldo Pontremoli was the founder of the first Institute of Physics of the University of Milan. The aim of this paper is to offer a reconstruction of his scientific career and how it was affected by the interplay between scientific practices, institutional abilities, and love for adventure. Pontremoli’s scientific life will be analysed in three main periods: the training years, the researches in Rome, and the researches in Milan. A particular attention will be given to the establishment of the Institute of Complementary Physics and of the Laboratory of Radiology, to the public competition for the chair of Theoretical Physics, and the 1928 polar expedition on the Italia airship.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On the Institute of Physics, see [2, 16, 59].

  2. 2.

    Primary sources are held in the following archives: Archivio di Stato in Rome, Historical Archives of Banca Intesa Sanpaolo in Milan, Historical Archives of Banca Popolare di Milano in Milan, Luigi Luzzatti Archive of Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti in Venice. Short biographies can be found in [12, 14, 15, 51, 52, 54]. Many biographical non-scientific details can be found in [18], a book written after Pontremoli’s death and mostly based on the family’s memoirs and the written correspondence between Pontremoli and his lifelong friend Massimiliano Majnoni d’Intignano (1894–1957) held in the Historical Archives of Banca Intesa Sanpaolo. Pontremoli’s mother thought the way her son’s life was described was a faithful one.

  3. 3.

    Teenagers, usually boys, building a radio apparatus by themselves were not an unusual fact until a few decades ago. We can never highlight enough the fact that Pontremoli, although in a childish way, framed in an institutional structure his scientific passion in building devices to study radio-waves transmission. Such an organisational mind was most probably the effect of his family education.

  4. 4.

    Pontremoli always felt a profound esteem for Murani. When Pontremoli came back to Milan in 1924 as a university professor, he refused to replace Murani and teach physics also at the Polytechnical High School.

  5. 5.

    There was usually just one physicist in each important university. Rome was an exception with two physicists.

  6. 6.

    The most important Italian physics journal, Il Nuovo Cimento became an international journal only after the Second World War.

  7. 7.

    Rutherford’s document has not been identified yet.

  8. 8.

    We call these nuclear stuctures “Rutherford’s neutron”—as Pontremoli himself did in the title of his paper—to distinguish them from the real neutron.

  9. 9.

    E.g., for platinum, the theoretical value was \(4.45\times 10^{-4}\) C/erg to be compared with the experimental value of \(7.20\times 10^{-13}\) C/erg.

  10. 10.

    Information on the establishment of the Institute of Complementary Physics can be found in: [52] and [53].

  11. 11.

    A Corbino-Trabacchi apparatus was a device used to produce extremely-high tension electrical currents as power suppliers for X-ray tubes, see [6].

  12. 12.

    The Littrow spectrograph is a prism with \(30^{\circ }\), \(60^{\circ }\), and \(90^{\circ }\) angles. The face opposing the \(60^{\circ }\) angle is coated with a reflective film.

  13. 13.

    If a light beam enters a Littrow spectrograph at the Brewster angle, it undergoes the maximum dispersion. The linear dispersion observed on the screen was of 1.14 m in the 2000–8000 Å  range with the quartz prism, and of 0.70 m in the 4000–8000 Å  range with the two glass prisms.

  14. 14.

    The Lummer-Gehrcke plate was a high-resolution, multiple-beam interferometric device. It was made of a plane-parallel quartz or glass plate. A light ray entering it undergoes multiple reflections inside the plate; the refracted, parallel, emerging rays can made interfere in the focal plane of a converging lens. The Lummer-Gehrcke plate was later replaced by the Fabry-Pérot etalons.

  15. 15.

    A typical Michelson grating has 500 rulings per millimeter.

  16. 16.

    A Fabry-Pérot etalon is a couple of two parallel, facing, partially-reflecting mirrors. They are the main component of the Fabry-Pérot interferometer.

  17. 17.

    The Möll microphotometer used: a thermocouple with galvanometer as a receiver; a slit to reduce the area on the photographic plate illuminated by the deflected beam to the exact dimensions of the incident beam. The incident and the deflected beams were connected by a linear relation.

  18. 18.

    For the microphotographs of X-rays produced by Pontremoli with a Coolidge tube, see [43].

  19. 19.

    The circle of Jamin and Sénarmont was an orientable brass circle. Two movable small circles, perpendicular to the large one, carried on them the analyser and the polariser connected to alidades and verniers for angle measurements.

  20. 20.

    The Weiss electromagnet is the historical model for most modern electromagnets, with cylindrical iron-cobalt poles wrapped by copper tubes as coils.

  21. 21.

    The Compton electrometer was a quadrant electrometer used for radioactivity measurements.

  22. 22.

    Archivio di Stato di Roma, MPI. DGIS DIV 1, Conc. catt. univ. 1924–1954. Minutes of the Theoretical Physics competition in the Royal University of Rome, 2nd meeting, pp. 3–4.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 3rd meeting, pp. 5–6.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., pp. 6–7.

  25. 25.

    On the Italian polar expeditions, see [21].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Fisica “Aldo Pontremoli”, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Leonardo Gariboldi

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  1. Leonardo Gariboldi
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Correspondence to Leonardo Gariboldi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. (Deceased), Milan, Italy

    Pier Francesco Bortignon

  2. Dipartimento di Fisica “Aldo Pontremoli”, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Giuseppe Lodato

  3. Dipartimento di Fisica “Aldo Pontremoli”, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Emanuela Meroni

  4. Dipartimento di Fisica “Aldo Pontremoli”, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Matteo G.A. Paris

  5. Dipartimento di Fisica “Aldo Pontremoli”, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Laura Perini

  6. Dipartimento di Fisica “Aldo Pontremoli”, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Alessandro Vicini

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Gariboldi, L. (2018). The Founder of the First Institute of Physics of the Milan University: Aldo Pontremoli, a Physicist’s Life Between Adventure and Institutions. In: Bortignon, P., Lodato, G., Meroni, E., Paris, M., Perini, L., Vicini, A. (eds) Toward a Science Campus in Milan. CDIP 2017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01629-6_10

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