At the Silesian railway station in Berlin before, I heard Einstein also mention that Italy would hold a conference early next year, but he didn't care about it at that time, and he didn't take it to heart at all.

Now that he heard Capitsa bring it up again, and thought of what Einstein said, he captured three useful pieces of information from the words of the two men.

[Next year], in [Italy], a [physicists' conference] will be held.

The next year, 1927.

The Solvay Conference was held every three years, and the last time the Fourth Solvay Conference was held in 1924.

In other words, in 1927, the Fifth Solvay Conference would be held, when the world's leading physicists would gather in Brussels to discuss the most advanced problems in physics today.

The problem lies here: the late Solvay, who was Belgian himself, used the money of the foundation he founded to hold physics conferences in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, at the same time.

The foundation had the money to build a "Solvay Palace" in Brussels to serve as a venue for meetings.

But I never heard of when Italians were keen to hold a conference on physics.

Especially after a few years ago, when the country's supreme head became that bald head, Italy implemented legalism on a national scale even earlier than Germany.

If Chen Muwu had not returned to China and the invitation to the meeting had been sent directly to him, he would have felt that he would definitely refuse to attend the meeting.

But now that Kapitsa had already signed up for himself, Chen Muwu felt that it was better to inquire about what the situation was at this meeting first, and then think about what to do.

"Peter, what's going on with this meeting? How come I don't know at all that this is going on? ”

"Chen, don't say you're weird, I just received the notice not long ago. The Italian organizers said that they wanted to commemorate the centenary of the death of the great Italian physicist Volta, so they held such a conference. ”

Volta, literally translated into Chinese, is Volta.

The name may be unfamiliar, but Volta has another, more well-known conventional translation: volta.

Alessandro Volta, inventor of the voltaic stack, pioneer of modern electrical research, 18th-19th century, great Italian physicist.

In commemoration of his pioneering achievements in the field of electricity, the standard units of physical quantities such as voltage and potential difference were named volts.

There is still a difference between the name voltain and the physical unit of volta.

The former is written as Volta, while the latter is to remove the last a from the name and become volt.

It has always been a habit in physics to name the units of various physical quantities after the great physicists in history.

But in the nineteenth century, when physicists were named after units, there was a bad trend of cutting out the names of these great people to a certain extent.

It's not just volts that delete A, they become volts.

The standard unit of capacitance, the farad, is not an abbreviation of the name of the great experimental physicist Faraday, but it has also been cut like volts, changing from Faraday to farad.

In addition, there is the unit of viscosity, Poiseuille, which comes from the French physiologist Poiseuille, who invented the mercury sphygmomanometer;

The unit of specific sound impedance, Rayleigh, is derived from the old Tomson teacher, the title of Rayleigh III.

And so on and so forth......

However, there is another way to say that volts are renamed volts when making potential difference units:

That's because in Italian, volta means "times".

1 volta， 2 volte， 3 volte

Once, twice, three times......

In order to prevent this misunderstanding, voltaic is changed to volt.

But it is estimated that this is another wild historical statement, because the two people who suggested using volts as a unit at the beginning were British electrical engineers, so they didn't care how the Italians read it.

And what the two electrical engineers suggested in 1861 was that volts be used as a unit of resistance, and it was not until twenty years later that volts were changed to a unit of voltage.

As the birthplace of the Renaissance movement, which changed the fate of Europe, great Italy was not only home to many great left-backs, but also many great physicists.

Not to mention an all-knowing and all-powerful genius like Leonardo da Vinci, but when it comes to the founder of physics, the greatest physicist in the world in the pre-Newtonian era, you must not be able to bypass Galileo.

In addition to Galileo, there was also Evangelista Torricelli, the student of Galileo who first discovered a vacuum in a column of mercury.

Then there is Amodeo Avogadro, who proposed the concept of molecules, as well as the difference between atoms and molecules, Avogadro's law and Avogadro's constant, named after his surname.

Around the time of Avogadro, there were also several masters of electricity in Italy.

The first was Luigi Galvani, a surgeon and professor of physics at the University of Bologna, who, while dissecting a dead frog, accidentally touched the frog's leg with a copper scalpel.

The frog's legs curled up for a moment, as if an electric current was passing by.

Since then, Galvani has gone further and further on the wrong path of "animal electricity", using the control variable method to try to test the frog's legs in different environments such as sunny, cloudy and rainy days, at different times of the day, using various materials such as iron screens, copper wires, iron plates, glass, rubber, rosin, stones, wooden boards, etc., in an attempt to find out the truth about the generation of electricity.

This mistake of Galvani is sad for himself, but it is a very great contribution to the development of physics as a whole.

Without Galvani's extensive experimental phenomena and data, more people would not have been attracted to the phenomenon of electricity, and his rival Volta would not have proposed a new idea of "metal electricity" that was different from "animal electricity", and eventually developed the electric stack.

Although the two men held different academic views, in order to commemorate Galwani's pioneering work in electricity, Volta named the stack he developed as the Galvani stack.

He didn't expect that in order to commemorate him, later generations would rename this thing as a voltaic stack.

Although Volta had already succeeded in developing an electric stack, Galvani's idea of animal electricity was not unfounded.

Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, succeeded his uncle as professor of physics at the University of Bologna after Galvani retired due to health reasons.

Although Volta's stack that could generate electric current had already been made at that time, it was confirmed that my uncle's "animal electricity" was a wrong theory, and "metal electricity" was the correct physical principle.

But Aldini went off the rails, and instead of stubbornly insisting on his uncle's erroneous theory, he set his sights on another problem.

Since electricity can make a dead frog's leg spasm, could it be that this technology could also be applied to other animals?

So Aldini experimented with a variety of animals larger than frogs, such as sheep, pigs, cows, and cattle, using electric shocks to the head, causing spasmodic movements of the eyes and tongue.

After experimenting with various animals, Aldini still didn't find it enjoyable, so he came up with a bold idea.

If animal carcasses are okay, are human carcasses okay too?

So Aldini began to use his status as a professor at the University of Bologna to enter the execution ground, using the corpses of prisoners who had just been sentenced to death for experiments, and also achieved good results.

After the initial results were achieved on the human body, Aldini's idea became more and more daring, since the electric current caused the body to spasm and re-move the eyes and tongue.

So can a large enough current bring a person back to life?

Aldini wanted to prove that he was right or wrong in this idea, but unfortunately he couldn't do it in Bologna.

Because of the great man Napoleon, northern Italy at that time had become the sphere of influence of the French.

In the Bologna region, and indeed on the entire European continent, the execution of prisoners was either with a guillotine of noble novelty improved by Louis XVI, or by brutal beheading.

This method of execution was very unfriendly to Aldini.

The human capital is separated, and no matter how much electricity is added, it will definitely not be able to be resurrected!

As a result, Aldini's eyes were set on Britain across the English Channel, the nearest country to which he was still hanged.

The man's ability to act was so strong that immediately after the idea came to him, he moved to London.

In London, Aldini quickly found the right man, a wife and daughter accused of assault, George Foster.

After the prisoner was sentenced to death by hanging, Aldini, in front of a group of doctors and bystanders, inserted the positive and negative poles into the mouth and ears of the corpse with a giant voltaic stack of 100 pieces of zinc and copper.

"His jaw began to tremble, the muscles around him showed a frightening twist, and his left eye was actually open."

After moving one of the electrodes to the rectum, it was found that the movement became more pronounced, "the prisoner's right hand was raised and clenched, and his legs and feet were moved", so that he appeared to be waking up and began to breathe again.

There was no internet, no television, no radio, and the British in the early nineteenth century were bored, so they would not give up any fun.

The onlookers at the scene spread the word that the news newspapers reported on this incident, and the British began to spread the word that Aldini was an Italian who had mastered the black technology of resurrecting people with electricity.

A five-year-old girl, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was also struck by this incident.

She later married a poet in 1816, changed her surname to Shelley after her husband, and two years later published Frankenstein, inspired by the electrocution of Aldini's corpse.

Because of this, Mary Shelley is known as the mother of science fiction.

Her husband, of course, was no ordinary poet, but Percy Bysher Shelley, known as the "poet of poets", is best known for a line in his work "Ode to the West Wind": "If winter comes, will spring be far away?" ”。

Physics and literature are linked together because of such an absurd thing.

Although Italian physics began to decline from the mid-nineteenth century, there were so many famous physicists in the history of the country.

But I haven't seen them commemorate the 150th anniversary of Avogadro's birth or the 70th anniversary of his death this year, so why do they suddenly start commemorating the ups and downs next year?

Could it be that the Italian academic community has awakened some great figure and is determined to recast the glory of Italy, and it is incumbent on my generation to do so?

Who is this man, Galilmo Marconi, who made a fortune from his wireless telegraph patents, or Enrique Fermi, the last glory of Italian physics?

Chen Muwu thought for a long time, and only thought of the two most famous Italians in the world today who have made achievements in physics, or will make achievements in physics.

The former is already famous all over the world, and the latter, uh, should have had a Fermi Dirac statistic, but was intervened by Chen Muwu, and now he should only be a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome.

Although Chen Muwu couldn't understand why Italy suddenly wanted to host a physicists' conference.

Speaking of which, behind this incident, there is really some connection with him.

It was neither Marconi nor Fermi who wanted to revive the glory of Italian physics, but the bald head mentioned earlier, who had only been in power for a few years.

Chen Muwu's return trip to China included a variety of events that took place while passing through various countries, including his speech during Sulian's visit, the dilemma he encountered while passing through customs in Poland, and the warm welcome he received when he visited the University of Berlin.

These things are always treated as science news and are the first to be in the newspapers.

There is Einstein in the front and Chen Muwu in the back, these two people are the most popular fried chickens in today's scientific community.

The bald head didn't expect a small physicist to have such a big influence.

Facing Chen Muwu, the Swedish crown prince thought about whether he could use his strength to improve the level of physics in his country.

But the bald head thought, since physics has such a great influence, should it not hold a physics conference in one's own country, so as to enhance the prestige of the country and enhance the national pride?

But when it comes to holding a meeting, there always needs to be a reason.

In modern times, Italian physics has declined, so we can only find a way to do it to the sages.

Avogadro, who happened to be born in 1776 and died in 1856, was a good candidate, and as Chen Muwu thought, this year 1926 is not only the 150th anniversary of his birth, but also the 70th anniversary of his death.

It's a pity that Avogadro's birth and death months were all in the summer, and by the time the bald head came up with the idea, the corresponding anniversary had already passed.

I had no choice but to give up on this great man and look for the next target.

So he died in 1827, and next year, 1927, it will be the 100th anniversary, which is more commemorative than the 150th anniversary and the 70th anniversary.

Because it was a commemoration of Volta, the venue of the meeting was chosen to Como, the hometown of Volta.

Lake Como is a resort in the foothills of the Alps.

Of course, it was also the place where the bald head was eventually shot, but he didn't know it yet.

Chen Muwu and Kapitsa chatted beside their luggage, and the Cambridgeshire postman rode his bicycle to the door of Trinity College, unloading a packet of letters and telegrams that belonged there.

After inspecting all the recipients, the hospital supervisor said loudly to them: "Academician Chen, there is a telegram from you. ”

"Where did it come from?"

"Roman ......"

These Italians were really fast enough, and as soon as Capitsa had promised to attend the meeting on his own behalf, they sent a telegram on the back foot?

Unexpectedly, there was a second half of the superintendent's words: "Well, it's not the Rome in Italy, but the one in the Papal States." ”

(End of chapter)