Starting from the seminal experience of James Prescott Joule, this paper aims to debate the possibility of “making” science outside universities and academies. Joule himself studied as an autodidact and did not make his own discoveries while following an academic path; on the contrary, at first, the associations and academic societies of the time tended not to recognize his works officially. All of this happened throughout the nineteenth century during the period of the first relevant tendency to science popularization. For (...) example, looking at the second half of the England of the 1800s, we can refer to Michael Faraday’s open lessons for children like The Chemical History of a Candle. Following this perspective from a historical view, this paper explores the Italian attempts to communicate science—from the ‘50s to the ‘70s—to a larger public via television and other media, also considering the political and social backgrounds behind this choice. In particular, this paper also deals with Lucio Lombardo Radice’s work on TV programs and writings in social-political journals and daily newspapers, as a mathematician and pedagogist engaged on the importance of what he specifically called “Scientific mediation”, as a “method” to teach and popularize science to a larger public. (shrink)

The principle of conservation of energy tells us that ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed’. The validity of the principle is without question. The problem is the concept. Contemporary physicists have asserted that we do not know what energy is. We find, however, 19th century physicists, contemporary physicists and historians of science who converge on the point: Mayer and Joule discovered energy. Therefore, we do not know what energy is, but we know these authors discovered it. (...) What did they then discover? What can we learn from this with regard to the energy concept problem? To deal with this issue, I will distinguish between what the authors did experimentally and what they said about the phenomena. This method of analysis makes the difference in relation to historical works on the subject. In a second step, I will consider the introduction of the energy concept, which is from 1850s, and the reification of the energy in 1880s. Finally, I will address the energy conservation principle and the concept of energy conveyed by this principle in contemporary textbooks. As we shall see, the conservation of a magnitude that we call energy nowadays was discovered by Mayer and Joule; an indestructible and transformable entity was not. Adopting the original conservation principle would be enough to avoid the energy concept problem. (shrink)