UNIVERSITY SCHOOL FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IUSS OF PAVIA 
Room 1.16 - Palazzo del Broletto, Piazza della Vittoria

12 MARCH 2025, 3 P.M. 
Failing to understand: the (uncomfortable) role of error in science 
Prof. Claudio PETTINARI, IUSS Pavia

‘Science does not proceed by accumulating only successes, but also by collecting errors and failures: from the neutrino faster than light to Fermi's Transuranic Elements, from errors due to ruined instruments, incorrect calculations, prejudices to those due instead to attempts to achieve success, we will tell how one can improve by making mistakes and the didactic and educational value of the scientific method’.

13 MARCH 2025, 3 P.M. 
Alchemy of Creativity: When Art and Chemistry Meet 
Prof. Claudio PETTINARI, IUSS Pavia

'Chemistry has always inspired artists, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets and writers. It has been the subject of stories, poems, paintings and songs. So much art and culture has arisen from observations of the chemical properties of matter. We would not have Raphael's Galatea without synthetic pigments such as Egyptian blue, nor Caravaggio's Magdalena Peni-tente if he had not used white lead. That is why I have decided to take a journey with you over two millennia, from Lucretius to Giulio Natta, observing Lavoisier, Faraday, Mendeleev, Bohr and Pasteur, and putting them side by side with great artists such as Dante, Asimov, Carroll, Stevenson, Levi and many others. It is a journey that will show how the evolution and progress of our society has often been the result of exceptional chemical discoveries.