Olinto De Pretto
Olinto De Pretto ( born April 26, 1857 in Schio, Vicenza, † March 16, 1921 ) was an Italian engineer and agronomist who also dealt with issues of geology and physics and in discussions on the history of the formula for the equivalence of mass and energy was mentioned.
De Pretto was one of seven children of the architect Pietro De Pretto (1810-1891), who also studied astronomy and geology. De Pretto attended the Higher Agricultural School in Milan, where he also studied geology in addition to agriculture. After graduating in 1879 he was there by Gaetano Cantoni assistant. After his death in 1887, he led the foundry of his older brother Silvio.
With his brothers Silvio Augusto and he founded an Alpine Club and with his brother Augusto, he published in 1888 a first geological treatise on the interrelationship of orogeny and glaciers, which was published in 1892 again in the Bulletin of the Italian Geological Society. This was followed by further work on the geology.
From 1899 he also dealt with speculation about the relationship of the newly discovered phenomenon of radioactivity with the ether theory. He is particularly interested also astronomical applications (the energy source of the stars, then a major unsolved problem).
1906 De Pretto was admitted to the Accademia dei Lincei.
Equivalence of mass and energy
In 1903 he published in the Proceedings of the Venetian Society of Sciences his essay Ipotesi dell'Etere nella Vita dell'universo " ( hypotheses on the airwaves in the life of the universe), where he took up that matter corresponds to an enormous reservoir of energy. Doing so, he went of the idea of matter as ether particles, which travel at the speed of light. Similar ideas were then distributed, and were, for example, previously also in 1875 published by the British engineer Samuel Tolver Preston ( Physics of the ether), that of the Le Sage theory of gravity was affected. De Pretto brought these ideas but also with the great powers of unknown origin in radioactivity and in astronomy and geology ( source of geothermal) in conjunction and postulated the transformation of one species into the matter stored rest energy of the ether. His essay was praised by the famous astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli of Milan, but was otherwise little attention.
Here, De Pretto used the term for the " living force ", which is contained in matter, which he identified with the speed of light. This formula does seem consistent with the formula of Albert Einstein, who in 1905 was derived as a consequence of his special theory of relativity.
How Ignazio Marchioro showed De Pretto's formula, however, was by no means identical with Einstein's equivalence formula, because the " vital force " was then only another expression for the kinetic energy, which is - so only half of the relativistic value. Now De Pretto calculated the energy of a body ( in calories) with - after Bartocci is 8338 actually represents twice the value of the heat equivalent ( the correct value is 4186.05, with De Pretto the outdated value 4169 used ). This results in:
Consequently, De Pretto actually used only the classical formula for the kinetic energy of the energy reservoir in the matter, and not.
The mathematics professor ( and critic of the theory of relativity ) Umberto Bartocci speculated that the paper by De Pretto Einstein was known and this inspired. After Bartocci Augusto De Pretto gave the essay to his friend Besso Beniamino in Rome, which in turn was the uncle of Michele Besso, the close friend of Einstein in Bern. In contrast, Ignazio Marchioro argued that no relationship between the formula De Pretto and the theory of relativity would be because he based his ideas on the airwaves, which no longer exists in the theory of relativity, and ( as shown above ) De Pretto only the formula for the kinetic energy used. Bartocci latter is certainly true, but he sticks to his opinion that Einstein was at least inspired by De Pretto's idea of a huge energy reservoir in the matter.