Physics Between the Wars: Mobility and Exchange, Lisbon Physics Laboratories and Institutions Beyond the Iberian Peninsula

Abstract

This paper provides a contribution to the history of physics in the period between the two world wars, examining relations between the physics laboratories of the University of Lisbon Faculty of Science and the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon on the one hand and the Laboratoire Curie, the Collège de France and other prestigious science institutions on the other hand. The location of the two Lisbon laboratories on the so-called European periphery did not mean that they did not produce knowledge. While the latter laboratory was equipped with the most advanced scientific instruments of the era, such as a spectrograph and a Zeiss microphotometer, at the former a research school with international standing was established from 1929 to 1947. Analysis is carried out in accordance with the historiographical methodology known as ‘following the money trail’, involving the study of funding, conducted in depth, from an impartial standpoint, which has the potential for producing new findings and leading to the reanalysis of established interpretations. In this paper, we examine the funding granted to these two Portuguese physics institutions by the Junta de Educação Nacional (National Education Board), established in 1929, which enabled Portugal to play a part in the European and American movement for the creation of scientific planning and funding institutions following World War I. This focus on the support provided by the dictatorial regime in Portugal to the two Lisbon laboratories also reveals the existence of resentment among scientists and resistance within these institutions, which limited the findings that they produced.