Date/Time
Date(s) - 28 Sep 2016
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
Paula Findlen (Chair, Department of History, Stanford University) will present “Newton’s Prisms: Why Francesco Algarotti Became an Experimenter.”
In the decade before Francesco Algarotti became internationally known for his Newtonianism for Ladies (1737) he first came to the attention of an international community of experimental philosophers for his role in the successful replication of Newton’s prism experiments during his philosophical studies in Bologna. This talk explores the circumstances that led the teenage Algarotti to become a celebrity experimenter in relation to debates about Newtonian science in Italy in the early eighteenth century. This episode has been studied and explained rather differently by Simon Schaffer and Alan Shapiro, emphasizing different dimensions of why Algarotti and his mentor succeeded with his prisms. Here I will offer another perspective that emerges from examining Algarotti and his world, and considering the long legacy of the prisms that Algarotti kept among his possessions that still exist today.
Paula Findlen is Chair, Department of History, Stanford University as well as Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Director of the Suppes Center. She recently edited Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800 and is a P.I. in Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters project.
This event is free and open to the public.
We invite historians, philosophers, and social theorists of science, medicine and technology to join us at any and all of the following talks. If you have any questions regarding the series, please contact Pamela Smith, [email protected], or Matthew Stanley, [email protected].