On 23 and 24 April 2026, SISSA in Trieste will host “Intrecci tra Scienza & Letteratura”, a conference organised by ILAS, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for the Natural Sciences and the Humanities, devoted to the relationship between scientific culture and literary imagination. The programme will unfold over two days of meetings and lectures featuring scholars from a wide range of fields, from physics to cosmology, from mathematics to the philosophy of science, as well as literary criticism and literary history.
The conference will bring into dialogue major authors and key questions from the literary tradition, tracing their intersections across four main thematic strands: the relationship between literature and cosmology; that between literature and mathematics; the encounter between writing and the natural sciences; and finally, the link between literature and the life sciences, encompassing life, metamorphosis, catastrophe and transformation. At the centre will be the thought and ideas of writers such as Leopardi, Paul Valéry, Musil, Gadda, Lewis Carroll, Jules Verne, Calvino and many others, highlighting once again how the great ideas of science have found in literature a space for debate, interpretation and imagination.
Among the guests will be Giuseppe Mussardo, theoretical physicist at SISSA and promoter of the initiative, who will compare Carroll and Verne as two different ways of imagining science; Luciano Boi, philosopher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and another promoter of the event, who will speak on Borges and geometry; Novella Bellucci and Franco D’Intino, among the foremost scholars of Leopardi, who will address the theme of science in the Zibaldone; Gaspare Polizzi, historian of philosophy and science, who will offer a reading of Paul Valéry between poetry and scientific thought; and Filippo La Porta, literary critic and essayist, who will discuss the role of artificial intelligence in literary commentary.
Alongside them, Claudio Bartocci, mathematician and historian of mathematics, will speak about the connection between Balzac, Valéry and the idea of a “romantic mathematics”; Roberto Trotta, cosmologist and Director of SISSA’s Interdisciplinary Laboratory, will address the relationship between literary narrative and the communication of science; Marco Bersanelli, astrophysicist and one of the leading figures in the ESA Planck mission, will offer a reflection on Leopardi and Newton between the finite and the infinite; Vincenzo Barone, theoretical physicist and essayist, will give a talk devoted to the relationship between quantum mechanics and literature; Vincenzo Crupi, philosopher of science, will take Brecht’s Galileo as a starting point for a reflection on freedom, dissent and scientific progress; Gian Italo Bischi, mathematician, will discuss Dante as a communicator of science; and Elena Ioli, physicist and science editor, will focus on nature writing as a form of narrating and interpreting the natural world.
The full programme is available at this link. All speakers and abstracts are available here.
The talks will be held in italian and are open to all.