Early years Boscovich was born on 18 May 1711 in
Dubrovnik,
Republic of Ragusa, to Paola Bettera (1674–1777), daughter of a local nobleman of
Italian origin, and
Nikola Bošković, a Ragusan merchant. Boscovich's father was an ethnic
Croat or an ethnic
Serb. He was baptised on 26 May 1711 by Marinus Carolis,
curatus et sacristia. The name Ruđer/Ruggiero may have been given to him because both his maternal great-grandfather, Agostino Bettera, and his mother's brother were called Ruggiero; his godfather was his uncle, Ruggiero Bettera. He was the seventh child of the family and the second youngest. His father was born in the village of
Orahov Do near
Ravno, at the time part of the
Ottoman Empire (now
Bosnia and Herzegovina). His uncle, Don Ilija Bošković, was killed by
Uskok bandits while celebrating Mass in 1692. While his father, Nikola, had once been a prolific trader who traveled through the Ottoman Empire, Ruđer only knew him as a bedridden invalid; he died when his son was 10 years old. Boscovich's mother Paola, nicknamed "Pavica", was a member of a cultivated Italian merchant family established in Dubrovnik in the early 17th century, when her ancestor, Pietro Bettera, settled from
Bergamo in northern Italy. She was described as a robust and active woman with a happy temperament who lived to 103.), thirteen years older, joined the service of the Ragusa Republic. Another brother, Bartolomej Bošković, born in 1700 and educated at the
Jesuit school in Dubrovnik, left home when Ruđer was 3 to become a scholar and a Jesuit priest in Rome. He also wrote verse in both Latin and "Illyrian" (the Renaissance era name for Serbo-Croatian), but eventually burnt some of his manuscripts out of a scrupulous modesty. Another brother, Ivan (Đivo) Bošković, became a Dominican in a sixteenth-century monastery in Dubrovnik, whose church Ruđer knew as a child with its rich treasures and paintings by Titian and Vasari, still there today. Another brother, Petar (Pero) Bošković, six years his senior, became a poet like his grandfather. He was schooled by the Jesuits, then served as an official of the Republic and made his reputation as a translator of Ovid, Corneille's Cid, and of Molière. A volume of his religious verse,
Hvale Duhovne, was published in Venice in 1729. At the age of 8 or 9, after acquiring the rudiments of reading and writing from Father Nicola Nicchei of the Church of St Nicholas, Ruđer was sent for schooling to the local
Jesuit Collegium Ragusinum. During his early studies, Boscovich showed a distinct propensity for further intellectual development. He gained a reputation at school for having an easy memory and a quick, deep mind. On 16 September 1725, Ruđer Bošković left Dubrovnik for Rome. He was in the care of two Jesuit priests who took him to the
Society of Jesus, famous for its education of youth and at that time having some 800 establishments and 200,000 pupils under its care throughout the world. We learn nothing from Bošković himself until the time he entered the novitiate in 1731, but it was the usual practice for novices to spend the first two years not in the
Collegium Romanum but in
Sant'Andrea delle Fratte. There, he studied
mathematics and
physics; and so quick was his progress in these sciences that in 1740 he was appointed professor of mathematics in the college. In 1745, Bošković published
De Viribus Vivis in which he tried to find a middle way between
Isaac Newton's gravitational theory and
Gottfried Leibniz's
metaphysical theory of
monad-points. He developed a concept of "impenetrability" as a property of hard bodies which explained their behaviour in terms of
force rather than
matter. Stripping atoms of their matter, impenetrability is disassociated from hardness and then put in an arbitrary relationship to
elasticity. Impenetrability has a
Cartesian sense that more than one point cannot occupy the same location at once. Bošković visited his hometown only once, in 1747, never to return. He agreed to take part in the Portuguese expedition for the survey of
Brazil and the
arc measurement of a degree of
latitude (
meridian arc), but was persuaded by the Pope to stay in Italy and to undertake a similar task there with
Christopher Maire, an English
Jesuit who measured an arc of two degrees between Rome and
Rimini. The operation began at the end of 1750, and was completed in about two years. An account was published in 1755, under the name
De Litteraria expeditione per pontificiam ditionem ad dimetiendos duos meridiani gradus a PP. Maire et Boscovicli. The value of this work was increased by a carefully prepared map of the
States of the Church. A French translation appeared in 1770 which incorporated, as an appendix, some material first published in 1760 outlining an objective procedure for determining suitable values for the parameters of the fitted model from a greater number of observations. An unconstrained variant of this fitting procedure is now known as the L1-norm or
Least absolute deviations procedure and serves as a robust alternative to the familiar L2-norm or Least Squares procedure. A dispute arose between
Francis the
Grand Duke of Tuscany and the
Republic of Lucca with respect to the drainage of a lake. As an agent of Lucca, Bošković was sent, in 1757, to
Vienna and succeeded in bringing about a satisfactory arrangement in the matter. Here he met
Karl Scherffer who became an influential promoter of the ideas of Bošković in Austria. ,
Humphry Davy, and
Michael Faraday. The ordinate is force, with positive values being repulsive, and the abscissa is radial distance. Newton's gravitational attractive force is clearly seen at the far right of figure 1. In
Vienna in 1758, he published the first edition of his famous work,
Philosophiæ naturalis theoria redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium (
Theory of Natural philosophy derived to the single Law of forces which exist in Nature), containing his
atomic theory and his theory of
forces. A second edition was published in 1763 in
Venice and a third again in Vienna in 1764. In 1922, it was published in London, and in 1966, in the United States. Another edition was published in
Zagreb in 1974. File:Boscovich-2.jpg|alt=|Outside of a 1763 copy of Boscovich's
"Theoria philosophiae naturalis, redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium" File:Boscovich-2 (3).jpg|alt=|Opening page
"Theoria philosophiae naturalis" File:Boscovich-2 (2).jpg|alt=|First page of
"Theoria philosophiae naturalis" Another occasion to exercise his diplomatic ability soon arose. The
British government suspected that
warships had been fitted out in Dubrovnik for the service of
France, and that therefore the
neutrality of the republic had been violated. Bošković was selected to undertake an
ambassadorship to
London in 1760, to convince the British that nothing of the sort had occurred and provide proof of Ragusa's neutrality. This mission proved to be a complete success – a credit to him and a delight to his countrymen. During his stay in
England, he was elected as a
fellow of the Royal Society. In 1761, astronomers were preparing to observe the
transit of Venus across the Sun. Under the influence of the Royal Society, Bošković decided to travel to
Constantinople. He arrived late and then travelled to
Poland via
Bulgaria and
Moldavia then proceeding to
Saint Petersburg where he was elected as a member of
Russian Academy of Sciences. Ill health compelled him soon to return to Italy. Bošković visited
Laibach, the capital of
Carniola (now
Ljubljana, Slovenia), at least in 1757, 1758, and 1763, and made contact with the Jesuits and the Franciscan friars in the town. The Jesuits incorporated his teachings into their lectures at the
Laibach Jesuit College. His physics became the foundation of physical lectures as well in other parts of the
Habsburg monarchy, and influenced the thought of, among others,
Gabriel Gruber and
Jurij Vega, prominent physicists of the period. Both Vega and the Rationalist philosopher
Franz Samuel Karpe educated their students in Vienna about the ideas of Bošković and in the spirit of his thought.
Late years In 1764, he was called to serve as the chair of mathematics at the
University of Pavia, and for six years he held this post with the directorship of the
observatory of
Brera in Milan, That is where
Charles Burney met him; since Burney's Italian was not very good at that time, Boscovich obliged him speaking French. He was invited by the
Royal Society of London to undertake an expedition to California to observe the
transit of Venus in 1769 again, but this was prevented by the recent decree of the Spanish government expelling Jesuits from its
dominions. Bošković had many enemies and he was driven to frequent changes of residence. About 1777, he returned to Milan, where he continued to teach and direct the Brera observatory. Deprived of his post by the intrigues of his associates, he was about to retire to Dubrovnik when in 1773, the news of the suppression of his order in Italy reached him. Uncertainty led him to accept an invitation from the King of France to come to Paris where he was appointed director of
optics for the navy, with a pension of 8,000
livres and a position was created for him. In France, Boscovich was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, Metz and Marseille. He naturalised in France and stayed for ten years, but his position became irksome, and at length intolerable. He, however, continued to work in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and published many remarkable works. Among them was an elegant solution to the problem of determining the
orbit of a
comet from three observations, and works on
micrometer and
achromatic telescopes. In 1782, Bošković was one of the founders of the
Accademia nazionale delle scienze detta dei XL (
National Association of the Sciences), with the name of "Società Italiana" (
Italian Association): this learned society gathered forty members representing the most important Italian scientists of the period. In 1783, he returned to Italy and spent two years at
Bassano, occupying himself with the publication of his
Opera pertinentia ad opticam et astronomiam, etc., published in 1785 in five volumes quarto. After a visit of some months to the convent of
Vallombrosa, he went to Brera in 1786 and resumed his work. At that time his health was failing, his reputation was on the wane, his works did not sell, and he gradually fell prey to illness and disappointment. He died in Milan and was buried in the church of St. Maria Podone.
Boscovich's demon In philosophy and physics,
Laplace's demon is a
thought experiment supporting the concept of
determinism. It suggests that if someone (the
Demon) knew the precise location and momentum of every particle in the universe, he could in principle calculate the history and future of every particle. While Laplace's version of determinism is based on general terms, Boscovich's uses physical terms, like position,
velocity, direction and
centre of mass. Boscovich also (correctly) suggests that the continuity of
force is a necessary assumption for determinism, and he presented it in strict mathematical form. In short, Boskovich's determinism is more physical, while Laplace's determinism is more metaphysical, placing it in harmony with
Leibniz's metaphysics. Knowing with complete accuracy both the location and velocity of a particle violates the
uncertainty principle of modern
quantum mechanics, so this is no longer considered physically possible. == Further works ==