Firenze University Press 
www.fupress.com/substantia

DOI: 10.13128/Substantia-15
Substantia. An International Journal of the History of Chemistry 1(1): 99, 2017

Acknowledgments

Our first thanks is for you, who are reading this page 
and this first issue of Substantia. We do rely on you, on 
your interest and on your patience, on your approval and 
also on your sincere criticism.

Substantia is the product of a great effort, of a great 
pleasure and of a renewed hope in the human capability 
to wonder about the beauty and complexity of reality and 
matter, and to inspect their features with the strength of 
reason..

Without this hope - or better without this certainty - 
any attempt to uncover and understand the world would 
be nosense and we would be pulled back to darkness.

We sincerely thank the authors of this first issue: they 
granted us the strength of their knowledge and wisdom, 
and gladly accepted the challenge of a new journal.

Thank you to the members of the international Sci-
entific Board, who offered their prestige and reliability 
for the benefit of the scientific level of the journal and to  
 

 
 
our colleagues in the Department of Chemistry, who wel-
comed the birth of Substantia.

Finally I want to express my deepest loyal gratitude 
to Moira Ambrosi, Antonella Capperucci, Laura Colli, 
Marco Fontani, Romeo Perrotta and Alessandro Pierno 
for sharing with me this challenging and tantalizing 
adventure. Their enthusiastic and tireless commitment 
was the first nourishment for our journal.

We tried to do our best, it has been and will be a 
great struggle. And for sure we could have done it better.

We apologize for any mistake and we thank you - the 
reader of these articles - for your invaluable support and 
for all the suggestions that you may want to share with us 
in the future.

Firenze, 25 January 2017

Pierandrea Lo Nostro
Editor-in-Chief


	The Biological/Physical Sciences Divide, and the Age of Unreason
	Barry W. Ninham
	Developments of NMR - From Molecules to Human Behaviour and Beyond
	C.L. Khetrapal1* and K.V. Ramanathan2
	The Tribulations of the Inventor
	Pierre-Gilles De Gennes*
	Modelling polymers as compressible elastic spheres in Couette flow
	Donglin Xie and Dave E. Dunstan*
	From Water to the Stars: A Reinterpretation of Galileo’s Style*
	Louis Caruana SJ
	I Felt Reborn (Primo Levi): From the Nobel Dynamite Factory to a Remembrance Place
	Luigi Dei
	New Astronomical Observations: Joseph Weber’s Contribution to Gravitational Waves and Neutrinos Detection
	Stefano Gottardo
	Isaac Newton and Alchemy 
	Vincenzo Schettino
	Science is Not a Totally Transparent Structure: Ştefania Mărăcineanu and the Presumed Discovery of  Artificial Radioactivity
	Marco Fontani1*, Mary Virginia Orna2, Mariagrazia Costa1 and Sabine Vater1,3
	Manifesto of the journal
	Acknowledgments