September 26^th, 2009

San Giorgio Maggiore Island, Venice
Giorgio Cini Foundation - Sala degli Arazzi (Tapestries Hall)

I mondi di Galileo (Galileo’s Worlds)
SPACE PHYSICS ON THE 100° ANNIVERSARY OF THE GUGLIELMO MARCONI NOBEL PRIZE

By Francesco Paresce

Everything started thanks to the intuition and strong determination of a man who believed in wireless communication and dedicated his life to experiment and prove it, as it is in the best Galileo’s tradition. This man was Guglielmo Marconi.
In December 1901 the radio signal he sent from Cornwall crossed the Atlantic ocean and was received at Newfoundland, thus proving for the very first time the existence of earth’s ionosphere. Nowadays we communicate by means of satellites and space probes, and we receive a huge amount of data from the extreme borders of our solar system.

The lecture tells the fundamental steps of that story, from the experiments that allowed Marconi win the Nobel prize for physics in 1909, to the striking discoveries of interplanetary probes such as Voyager and the space telescope Hubble.

Francesco Paresce Marconi is the Scientific Manager of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer at the European Southern Observatory.