00:00That in Romania for the first time physics was taught in Greek?
00:04Before Tudor Vlad Vladimirescu's revolution, education in Romania was
00:08strongly influenced by the former Byzantine Empire and teaching was done
00:12in Greek, similar to how sciences were taught in Latin in the West.
00:16This tradition began in the buildings of the Saint Sava monastery in Bucharest
00:20where between 1694 and 1776 there was an educational institution that later
00:27evolved into what we know today as the Royal Academy.
00:30Here, three teachers shared the basic knowledge of philosophy and natural sciences
00:35with one of them focusing on logic, rhetoric and physics.
00:39About the sky, about the soul, about birth and decay and finally metaphysics.
00:45The first teacher who taught physics at this school was Sevastos Chiminidis,
00:50a Greek scholar invited to Bucharest by Konstantin Brankovianou.
00:54Under his guidance, physics was not seen just as a branch of science but as an integral part
01:00of natural philosophy. Chiminidis followed the Neo-Aristotelian philosophy promoted by
01:06Theophil Koridaliou, who argued that eternal matter is the cause of all physical phenomena.
01:12According to this view, matter, in its continuous motion, transforms and takes on various forms,
01:18which can be observed and explained through experiments such as the influence of heat
01:23and sunlight on the development of the terrestrial world.
01:27This is how, from the very beginning, physics was presented in Romania as a discipline that uses
01:33rational thinking to explore and understand the laws of nature.
01:37Did you know that the first professor dedicated exclusively to physics in Romania was Manas Eliade?
01:54He returned from there with a pneumatic machine and an electrostatic one.
01:59These events revitalized the study of physics at the academy.
02:02Among the physics professors at the royal academy, we find the Greeks,
02:06Rigas Vélez Stinglis, and Michifo Teotokis, the latter contributing with his textbook Elements of Physics,
02:13which also included theories from Descartes and Newton.
02:17Werniermeind of Lesbos, another influential professor at the academy, proposed an original
02:22theory about the transmission of heat and magnetism based on the intrinsic energies of objects.
02:27Konstantin Vartalajos, another professor at the royal academy, wrote the work Experimental Physics and a
02:33Treatise on Electricity, influenced by the ideas of Benjamin Franklin.
02:38He stressed using instruments.
02:40He was convinced that experimental physics is more suitable for attracting students' interest.
02:47On the other hand, the professor from the Veniamind Academy in Lesbos was known for a position
02:52opposed to Newton's theory, promoting his own theory called Panta-Panta-Ciekineticon.
02:57The gravitational attraction between two objects would be caused by the existence of an etheric fluid,
03:03whose flow between the objects is proportional to the volume of the objects.
03:07Variants still appear today on internet forums. Interestingly, the students' examination is public.
03:13In the year 1811, the students had to answer questions about rejection, air rarefaction,
03:20melting, explosion, and students. How would you cope if the physics exam were public?
03:28Did you know that the first teacher to teach physics in Romanian in Bucharest was Gheorghe
03:34Lazar shortly before Tutor Vladimirescu's uprising? In 1818, Gheorghe Lazar appeared before the council.
03:41He firmly argued that the Romanian language has the necessary resources to express the truths of
03:46science as well. He convinced them and chose to teach physics. He was educated in physical sciences at
03:53the University of Vienna. After Lazar's retirement in 1822, the baton of teaching physics in Romanian
04:00was taken over by the well-known writer Ion Heliadea Radulescu. Another remarkable disciple of Gheorghe
04:06Lazar was Petrace Poenaru, born in 1799, who graduated from the Polytechnic School in Paris.
04:14There, Poenaru was inspired enough to register a patent for the self-inking portable pen,
04:20which feeds itself with ink. Whether that makes him the inventor of the fountain pen,
04:27I'll let you debate in the comments. In 1833, Petrace Poenaru issued a regulation for the School of
04:33St. Sava, which required it to be equipped with five copies of textbooks and various devices for physics,
04:39chemistry, as well as instruments for geometry and mechanics. At that time, few understood the
04:45importance of physics. During the 1848 revolution, the physics instruments were gathered in the
04:51courtyard of St. Sava College, where they were left exposed to the rain and snow. After a while,
04:57Ban Aleku Filippescu gave orders to make a big fire and burn all the instruments.
05:02In this way, he said, their light would bring justice and brotherhood to the country.
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06:12For me, the best example of a science teacher remains Alexei Marin. In the year 1881,
06:18he wrote the book Mosh, Potru or The Village Teacher, a conversation about super mechanics.
06:23Here he explains mechanics to some children from the countryside, using the wheels of the cart,
06:28the tools from the yard and pretty much everything the peasant had around the household.
06:33His pedagogical talent was noticed from a young age by another well-known educator,
06:38Gheorghe Ardellianu, who involved him in his teaching activities as early as the age of 11.
06:44At the age of 20, Marin took part in the first teachers competition in Romania,
06:49where he obtained a teaching position at St. Sava College. During his career,
06:54he published textbooks on popular astronomy and mechanics, and in 1846, he received a scholarship
07:00to Paris. There he studied with renowned scientists such as Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac and Urbain Le Verrier.
07:07After returning to Romania, Alexei Marin became a physics teacher at St. Sava College,
07:12and in 1864, he was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Bucharest.
07:18Here is how IC Severiano describes his physics lessons.
07:22Professor Alexei Marin would rub a red wax stick with a cat's fur until he broke into a sweat and
07:28would ask the students, did you hear it? Did you see it? Of course he was talking about the electric
07:34spark. And the students, just to tease him, would answer, we didn't hear it and we didn't see it,
07:39Mr. Alexei, and he would promise that next class he would make the spark. Bigger and louder. This is
07:45what the first physics textbook in Romanian looks like. What, you don't understand anything? That's
07:50because it's written in Cyrillic letters. If you understand a little, you can decipher the title
07:56Elementary Physics. This happened in Iyasi and the year was 1849. The author of the textbook is
08:03professor Teodor Stamati, who taught mathematics and physics at the department of philosophy at the
08:08Mihailiana Academy in Iyasi, the predecessor of the city's university. His textbook included basic
08:15concepts from physics, such as optics, mechanics, and thermodynamics. Don't think it was easy to teach
08:20physics in Romanian back then because specific words hadn't been translated yet. For this, Stamati wrote a
08:26small Romanian dictionary of technical words and other hard to understand terms in the year 1150.
08:33He chose to call the phenomenon of reflection the bending of light and refraction the bending back
08:39of light. Today, it is preferred to directly import words from English, with their meaning also being
08:46translated directly. Theodor Stamati also contributed significantly to the popularization of science
08:52through his articles in the newspaper Albina Romanijska. Can you read this text in Slavonic from his book?
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09:09Until next time, I'm Christian Prasura. You are cool and I wish you all the best at kindergarten!
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