Saturday's Google Doodle Celebrates Physicist Laura Bassi

[Judi Lynn]

Apr 17, 2021,02:13am EDT|1 views
Kiona N. Smith

Saturday’s Google Doodle honors physicist Laura Bassi, the first woman to earn a doctorate in science. Bassi spent much of her 46-year career exploring the physics of electricity and popularizing Isaac Newton’s ideas about motion and gravity. She also fought for decades to be allowed to teach, research, and publicly present her work on the same terms as her male colleagues.

Nerves Of Steel

24 years before Bassi was born, an English physicist and mathematician named Isaac Newton published a book explaining the physical laws that govern how objects move and how gravity influences them. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (commonly known as Newton’s Principia, because he published it in Latin, as one did in the 1600s) is one of the foundations of modern physics. By the time Bassi was a teenager in Bologna, learning logic and natural philosophy from her family’s physician, Newton’s ideas were still pretty controversial in scientific circles – controversial enough, in fact, to drive a wedge between Bassi and her tutor by the time she was 20.

But by then, Bassi’s academic brilliance (combined, probably, with her family’s social and political connections) had attracted the attention of Prospero Lambertini, then the Archbishop of Bologna and eventually Pope Benedict XIV. In a period when women weren’t even admitted to most universities, Lambertini wielded enough power to make sure that Bassi got her chance at a doctorate.

That chance took the form of a public challenge. Lambertini arranged for Bassi to present 49 theses – essays proposing her ideas about science – and defend them in a debate against four professors of physics from the University of Bologna.

On April 17, 1732, Bassi defended her theses in the Palazzo Publico, one of Bologna’s most important government buildings, and the audience was packed with university professors, students, city officials, religious leaders, and assorted nobility. The university awarded Bassi a doctorate in physics less than a month later, making her the second woman to hold a doctorate – and the first to hold one in a science. Her predecessor, Elena Cornaro Piscopia, had earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1678.

More:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2021/04/17/saturdays-google-doodle-celebrates-physicist-laura-bassi/?sh=d56f94422da4

[Rhiannon12866]

1. Thanks!

I learn something new on DU every day!