An 18th-century Jesuit imagined atoms as points of pure force
Roger Joseph Boscovich, a priest from Dubrovnik, stripped matter out of atoms altogether and described them as points surrounded by forces. The same man helped save the cracked dome of St Peter's, showed the Moon has no atmosphere, and ran diplomatic errands between rival states. His 1758 masterpiece was still being reprinted in the 20th century.
Born on 18 May 1711 in the Republic of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, he was the seventh child of a merchant who became a bedridden invalid and a mother from an Italian merchant family who lived to 103. After Jesuit schooling at home he left for Rome in 1725, entered the order's novitiate in 1731, and learned mathematics and physics so quickly that by 1740 he was professor of mathematics at the Collegium Romanum. He returned to his hometown only once, in 1747.
His practical reputation came early. In 1742 Pope Benedict XIV consulted him and other scholars about a crack in the dome of St Peter's; his proposal of five concentric iron bands was adopted. With the English Jesuit Christopher Maire he measured a meridian arc of two degrees between Rome and Rimini from late 1750, producing a careful map of the Papal States. In 1753 he established that the Moon lacks an atmosphere, and he devised geometric methods for finding a rotating planet's equator, and a planet's orbit, from just three observations.
The big idea grew from a 1745 attempt to reconcile Newton's gravity with Leibniz's monads. Boscovich explained the hardness of bodies through force rather than stuff, so that impenetrability simply meant two points cannot share one place. His Theory of Natural Philosophy, published in Vienna in 1758, derived everything from a single law of forces and is seen as a precursor of atomic theory; editions followed in 1763 and 1764, then London in 1922.
Travel and turbulence marked his later years. Chasing the 1761 transit of Venus, he reached Constantinople too late but was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences on the journey home. When his order was suppressed in Italy in 1773, he accepted the King of France's offer to direct optics for the navy, stayed ten increasingly unhappy years, and died on 13 February 1787.
Source: Roger Joseph Boscovich
