The science we know today is the result of exchanges that have taken place over the last millennia between nations, empires, and civilizations. Scientific instruments constitute the material testimonies of these exchanges of knowledge and scientific practices. Think, for example, of the astrolabe: it has origins dating back to Ancient Greece, then experienced extraordinary development in the Islamic world, until it penetrated Christian Europe around the year 1000, finally becoming one of the symbols of the Renaissance. If the astrolabe is paradigmatic of the multiculturality of science, almost every scientific instrument of the past and present bears its traces: think of the Indo-Arabic origin of numbers or the division of the circle into 360 degrees, introduced by the scholars of ancient Babylon. At the Poleni Museum, following the project “Science from the Islamic world to Europe today“, we are continuing to work to develop new projects and increasingly highlight the multiculturality of science, a multiculturality that today constitutes an extraordinary bridge for uniting different people and cultures.
