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Boscovich, Roger Joseph (1711–1787)

Roger Joseph Boscovich (Rudjer Josef Boskovic, or Ruggiero Giuseppe Boscovich) was born on September 18, 1711, in Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Dalmatia, to a large Catholic family. He finished his principal work, Theoria Philosophice Naturalis Redacta ad Unicam Legern Virium in Natura Existentium (A Theory of Natural Philosophy Reduced to a Single Law of the Actions Existing in Nature), in Vienna in 1758, and a definitive edition in Latin and English appeared in 1763. Boscovich's scientific accomplishments were so extensive that they cannot be listed here. He published about 100 scientific treatises (most in Latin) and during his lifetime had an academic scientific reputation in France and Italy, England and the United States, as well as in the Slavic world.

Yet the rest of his exceptional life was eclipsed by the fact that Boscovich was the undisputed founder of one of the three families of atomic theory. Boscovich's considerable scientific reputation today is based largely on the theory of matter that he formulated in his Theoria. This work helped shape modern conceptions both of matter and of the force field. For example, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell adapted their theories of the electromagnetic field to ideas based on Boscovich's theory of natural philosophy.

His Theoria consists of a great many topics in physics, which may be skipped over by the reader interested primarily in his theory of time. Supplements I and II of the Theoria contain Boscovich's mature theory of time, space, and matter. Upon reading his entire magnum opus, though, the modern nature of Boscovich's system becomes apparent. His theory of point particles (puncta) includes kinematics, along with a relational and structural understanding of particles. In the case of high-speed particles, Boscovich foresaw the penetrability of matter.

Though his father was of purely Serbian lineage and his mother of Slavonic-Italian origins, Boscovich always insisted he was a Dalmatian nationalist. He died on February 13, 1787, of an extended lung ailment.

Boscovich's Relation to Zeno, Newton, and Leibniz

To understand Boscovich's notion of time, it is best to summarize his own place in the history of Western reflections on time. Even at the beginning of Boscovich's career, the paradoxes of motion posed by Zeno of Elea in the long-past Presocratic period still confounded science.

One paradox assumes two columns of soldiers marching past each other at the same speed and in front of columns of stationary soldiers. Zeno demonstrated that the soldiers would be moving at both half-speed and double-speed relative to the other marchers. He considered this absurd, dismissing, in a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument, the assumption of real time. His paradox of motion, then, was a conceptual problem for all serious thinkers.

In reply to Zeno, Aristotle had argued that instead of using multidimensional objects, such as columns of soldiers, unextended points should be employed. In agreement with Aristotle, Boscovich embraced zero-dimensional points as the basis of his notions of time and space.

But this led to another conundrum that still baffled thinkers at the time of Boscovich; using only such unextended points, it is impossible to construct continuous space. This is true because either the points touch, in which case they “com-penetrate” and become one point, or they do not touch, in which case a continuous space or time cannot be constructed. Boscovich solved the remaining problem by rejecting the validity of the law of continuity as applied to space and time, whereas the law of continuity holds true (only) for motion. Thus he founded one of three primary families of atomic theory: point-particle atomism.

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