Welcome

This is the subject of my teachings, and I go on to describe
all the possible causes of the stars’ movement across the Universe.
Of these hypotheses, only one must be the correct explanation,
but what animates the bodies in the sky is still beyond the grasp
of those who move at an honest pace through the path to Truth.

Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things, V 529-533

Welcome to my personal blog! What follows is a list of the categories of this website. Click on the title to see the articles it contains. A list of categories is available on the left of this page too (if you are browsing on a PC).

Resilience, pencil on paper, Paolo Maccallini, 2019.

A collection of most of my writings on mechanics, mathematics, and biomedicine is available on my Academia page. A collection of my drawings can be found on my Instagram.

Below you find a list of all the articles on this website, ordered from the most recent one to the very first article, published in 2016. Some blog posts are only in Italian, but you can translate them into your language of choice by using the bar on the left.

As for the quote from the poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, an early example of scientific divulgation, the original hexameters in Latin are the following ones:

… id doceo, plurisque sequor disponere causas,
motibus astrorum quae possint esse per omne;
e quibus una tamen sit et hic quoque causa necessest,
quae vegeat motum signis; sed quae sit earum
praecipere haudquaquam est pedetemptim progredientis.

Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura, V 529-533

The reader may have recognized some similarities with ideas promoted by natural philosophers who were born after Galileo had started the scientific revolution, about sixteen centuries apart from the end of Lucretius’ life. Besides the obvious “Hypotheses non fingo” by which Newton admitted that even though his mathematical model described so well the movement of planets, he had no idea of the cause of gravity; besides that, we can also mention Chamberlin’s “Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses” (R) that seems to follow the footprints of these few lines from the fifth book of De Rerum Natura. Verses in which almost a presage of the convergence of a Baconian series can perhaps be acknowledged; a prophecy that has traveled through twenty centuries to teach us what we have painfully learned again during this vertiginous hiatus and that we often forget about.


Human proportions

Artists have proposed different proportions for the human body, throughout history. In ancient Egypt, the height of a human figure was set at 6.33 times the length of his foot [1]. For Michelangelo, as well as for Lisippo, the ideal height of a man was 8 times the head [1], [2]. In 1958, Burne Hogarth…

Non Solo Fatica, il mio intervento

Il mio intervento durante il convegno online Non Solo Fatica (15 aprile 2023). Riporto i risultati di una serie di analisi statistiche sui dati genetici di 1659 pazienti con ME/CFS. Le slide dell’intervento possono essere scaricate qui. L’intero convegno può essere visto gratuitamente a questo indirizzo, previa iscrizione.

The measure of Dante’s Universe

At the end of the twenty-seventh canto of Paradiso (Divine Comedy), Dante Alighieri describes his ascension towards the ninth sphere of the Ptolemaic model of the universe: the Primum Movens, which contains and gives motion to all the previous skies (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Fixed Stars), that rotate around the center…

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Chronic Fatigue at the National Institutes of Health

Introduction I summarize in Table 1 the results of a single-center, exploratory, cross-sectional study of post-infectious Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (PI-ME/CFS) conducted by the National Institute of Health, from October 2016 to January 2022. All the details of the study are available at this address. I run, for each measure, a statistical test. The analysis was performed…

Loading…

Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.

Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.