The Malleability of Physics

genealogies of a discipline in the Río de la Plata in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The development of physics in Uruguay is usually associated with the institutional impulses that Uruguay undertook after the restoration of democracy in 1985. The historiography of science in recent times has made this story more complex, showing those impulses that took place in the country throughout the twentieth century, with the intention of building an environment conducive to the professional practice of physics in the country. This article seeks to contribute to these last attempts, by showing how, already in the 19th century, efforts to think about the problems of nature and the individual in terms of a new discipline can be registered, which takes up these issues of philosophy but interprets them in the light of the discoveries that took place in that century. In Uruguay and the region, the part of philosophy that was called General and Particular Physics was taken up and elevated by a group of physicists who tried to reform philosophical thought in the Rio de la Plata context, in the decades surrounding the beginning of the 1800's, taking its course towards the experimental science that was growing in the old continent. This paper is subdivided into five sections: i) a presentation of natural philosophy in the Rio de la Plata at the beginning of the 19th century; ii) the turn towards physics proposed by a group of philosophers called fisicistas; iii) the problems of physics that were of special interest to these ficisistas; iv) the teaching of physics in the creation of the Universidad Mayor de Montevideo, in 1849; and v) the modernization of physics in the creation of the Faculties of Medicine and Mathematics in 1883 and 1888, respectively.