Giorgio Piccardi's Contribution To the Progress of Science

Dr. Piero Faraone, Vice-President of CIFA

Giorgio Piccardi began his study of chemistry in his native city of Florence, in 1913, when was eighteen years old. The First World War, 1915-18, forced him to abandon his studies, and he was sent to the Italian front as an officer in an Alpine unit. He was demobilized in the 1919, returned to Florence and completed his studies, obtaining his doctorate in chemistry. He began his teaching career as a university professor in chemistry and physics in 1926. Piccardi become a principal of the chemistry-physics department at the University of Genoa in 1938 after a competitive examination. Here he founded the Chemistry-Physics Institute with spectroscope laboratory, where he studied atomic and molecular spectra of rare-elements.

The Second World War forced him to return to Tuscany, where he worked at the University of Florence. He was a principal of chemistry-physics department from 1945 through 1965. He founded the school of studies for surface and inter-phase phenomena, with subsequent applications in biological field. He conducted studies on chemical structures and spectroscopy, with industrial and archaeological applications.

Piccardi devoted his studies, in particular, to physical/chemical fluctuating phenomena, which he identified and examined. He invented his own methods of investigation, and become internationally recognized as authentic pioneer in this area of research. He successfully founded a university Center for the study of fluctuating phenomena (CUFF). The Center collaborated with similar other centers of the foreign countries, so investigations based on Piccardi's methods were spread out world wide, including Arctic and Antarctic.

After 1951 his scientific activity was directed mainly to fluctuating phenomena, which he investigated using his colloidal tests. He conducted those studies for twenty years and completed them with the following very impressive concept: "Heterogeneous systems, out of balance and sufficiently complex, respond to every external stimulus, even with the little amount of energy." This theory regards a large group of the chemical reactions and biological processes. Piccardi was nationally and internationally recognized for his studies.

Piccardi founded the CIFA(1969), an International Committee for study of environmental phenomena, and was its first President until his death. CIFA head office was in Brussels(Belgium) under the aegis of the "Libre Universite de Bruxelles". Piccardi increased his scientific activity, publishing over two hundred publications, including a monograph printed in United States and in Russia (The Chemical Basis of Medical Climatology). He was active until 1972, the year he died.

During his ardent scientific career, where he devote himself to studies of fluctuating phenomena through his colloidal tests, he found an excellent collaborator in Dr. Carmen Capel-Boute, who worked at Free University of Brussels, and was a president of the International Center for Research and Study of Environmental Factors (CIREFA).

Dr. Capel-Boute was a researcher in electro-chemistry and metallurgy at the School of Applied Science at Brussels university. She met Professor Piccardi in 1950 in Florence. Prof. Piccardi wrote to her: " It is very rare, Madame, to find himself completely at ease, with a person, met casually in his life." And Dr. Capel-Boute, after this meeting, wrote about him, "A pact of scientific trust was signed with an exceptional seal of esteem and reciprocal friendship, which is confirmed by the uninterrupted correspondence we carried on since that memorable encounter." And again, "I was, in this way, able to perceive Piccardi as a conscious Magister and I availed myself of him. I was about twenty years younger than he, to benefit from his vast scholarship, of his long experience, and his constructive criticism of my research."

The result of the encounter between the two scholars was a solid and harmonious collaboration in research of fluctuating phenomena and features of water solutions and, considering the important role of physical properties of water, as well as the effects of solar activity in the variations of colloidal tests studied simultaneously, in Florence and Brussels.

Dr. Capel-Boute was president of CIFA after prof.Piccardi and was always of good inspiration with her inexhaustible passion and experience, for her collaborators and the other scientists, in every possible discussion on the years until to day. She never deflected in her efforts showing herself as the natural heir of prof.Piccardi, not only in her research but also in her human abnegation.

In the 1987 she left the presidency to Dr.E.P.Wedler (Biometeorological Institute of the Free University of Berlin). After his death in the 1990, Dr. Capel-Boute temporarily resumed the status of president of CIFA, in spite of her mature age. When she was eighty years old, she had extraordinary success in conclusion an agreement with the Institute of Biological Physics (Puschino, Moscow Region, Russia, 1993) where CIFA obtained the new head office.

Since 1993 CIFA has new president, professor Boris Vladimirsky, a physicist and astronomer (Crimea Astronomical Observatory in Nauchny, now Ukraine), new vice-president prof. Simon Shnol, biologist (Institute of Biological Physics, Puschino University, Moscow State University), and other two vice-presidents, Dr. Imre Ormenji, biometereologist (National Institute for Rheumatism, Budapest), and Dr. Piero Faraone, micro-biologist, formerly Medical director (1976-1991) of the Lab. Ig. Prof. Prov. Roma.