Giulio Cesare Lagalla

Giulio Cesare Lagalla (* 1576 in Padula, † 1624) was an Italian professor of philosophy. ( His name is often given as Julius Caesar Lagalla or Giulio Cesare La Galla. )

He was born in Padua, which belonged at that time to the Kingdom of Naples. Lagalla was educated in philosophy and medicine. He was the official doctor of the papal galleys for some time and then went to Rome to stop at the Collegio Romano lectures on natural philosophy. He quickly became the leading Peripatetic the city, and was one of the opponents of the heliocentric Copernican world view.

As a result of made ​​using a telescope observations of the moon by Galileo Galilei, which were published in Sidereus Nuncius, Lagalla published a document in reply. He had participated in the demonstrations of the telescope by Galileo and not one of those who drew the possibilities of the instrument in doubt. However, he doubted Galileo's three-dimensional representation of the moon, as it was based on two-dimensional visual observations. Lagalla has the first drawing of the moon created based telescopic observations, which is considered lost.

In his book De Phenomenis in Orbe Lunae, which it published in Venice in 1612, he denied the possibility that an untreated stone ( the expulsion of volatile substances by heating ) can emit light only by calcination. This stone, which was known as " lapis solaris ", was shown to him by Galileo Galilei. We know today that the " Bolognese Light Stone " was a piece of barite ( barium sulfate).

In 1935 the International Astronomical Union ( IAU) decided to name the Lagalla crater on the Moon after him.

Bibliography

• De luce et altera lumine disputatio
• De phaenomenis in baskets lunae novi telescopii usu nunc iterum suscitatis, Venice in 1612.
• De immortalitate animorum Ex Arist. sententia, Rome 1621