Antonino Lo Surdo

Antonino Lo Surdo (4 February 1880 in Syracuse – 7 June 1949 in Rome) was an Italian physicist. He was appointed as professor of physics at the Istituto di Fisica in Rome in 1919; upon the death of

Orso Mario Corbino Orso Mario Corbino (30 April 1876, Augusta – 23 January 1937, Rome) was an Italian physicist and politician. His younger brother was Epicarmo Corbino. He served as the minister for education in 1921 and as the minister for economy in 1921. H ...

in 1937, he became the director. Lo Surdo studied terrestrial physics, including seismology and geophysics; the

1908 Messina earthquake The 1908 Messina earthquake (also known as the 1908 Messina and Reggio earthquake) occurred on 28 December in Sicily and Calabria, southern Italy with a moment magnitude of 7.1 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (''Extreme''). The epice ...

caused the death of his parents and other close relatives, except his brother. He contributed to the foundation of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica under the auspices of the

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche The National Research Council (Italian: ''Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR'') is the largest research council in Italy. As a public organisation, its remit is to support scientific and technological research. Its headquarters are in Rome. ...

, when its president was Guglielmo Marconi. His name is remembered for the discovery (made independently by

Johannes Stark Johannes Stark (, 15 April 1874 – 21 June 1957) was a German physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields". This phe ...

) in 1913 of the effect on an electric field on the emission spectrum of a gas. This physical phenomenon is called the Stark-Lo Surdo effect in Italy (and is generally known outside Italy simply as the ''Stark effect''). The discovery of the effect was a remarkably important contribution to the development of the quantum theory. Lo Surdo's discovery of the effect led

Antonio Garbasso Antonio Garbasso (16 April 1871 – 14 March 1933) was an Italian physicist and National Fascist Party politician. He was the 14th mayor and the 1st podestà of Florence, Kingdom of Italy The Kingdom of Italy ( it, Regno d'Italia) was a state t ...

to introduce quantum theory into the Italian universities. 20th-century Italian physicists Scientists from Sicily 1880 births 1949 deaths Victims of the 1908 Messina earthquake {{Italy-physicist-stub