THE PHYSICS MUSEUM OF SARDINIA

With this site we present the teaching and scientific instruments conserved in the Physics Museum of Sardinia, located in the Department of Physics of the University of Cagliari, Italy.
We present only those instruments of interest from the viewpoints of teaching, science and history which, owing to their characteristics, convey a fairly accurate idea of the consistency and quality of the collection.
Choices were made so as to give a sufficiently wide-ranging overview of the instruments, especially those used as teaching aids in the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries in universities and upper secondary schools in Italy and Europe in general.
Aware of the arbitrariness of the choices and some inevitable compromises, we have arranged the instruments presented herein in just five large chapters: ELECTROMAGNETISM, ACOUSTICS, MECHANICS, OPTICS and THERMOGRAPHY.
Lacking the chapter on METROLOGY, we have included in each chapter the measuring instruments of the respective characteristic magnitudes; thus in MECHANICS we find the instruments for measuring angles, lengths and time intervals.
In MECHANICS we also included a terrestrial globe and an octant and, lacking a chapter on ASTRONOMY, also an equinoctial clock, a celestial sphere and a Copernican system, while astronomical telescopes are found in OPTICS, together with terrestrial ones.
Some hard-to-classify instruments and workshop or laboratory utensils have been classified as MISCELLANEOUS.