Here is the English translation of your text:
This text accurately captures the classic Enlightenment paradox: the threshold where anti-pedantic satire borders on anti-intellectualism, unable to distinguish fertile scientific speculation from mere delusion. Pignotti's satire in Il bastone miracoloso unintentionally functions as an inventory of 18th-century proto-science. In attempting to ridicule pedantry, it ended up bequeathing a perfect X-ray of the scientific method in its trial-and-error phase: men getting the numbers and mechanisms wrong, but getting the fundamental questions right.
I suspect the world was born from a collision of comets (or Buffon against the mockers of the Stick)
There is a moment in Canto I of Il bastone miracoloso that is usually read as a pure 18th-century dinner-table joke, but is actually a fairly precise catalogue of the most audacious scientific discussions of its century. When the genie asks Ismaele what physics has taught him about the "surprising arcanum of nature," the young man replies with a list of theories on the origin of the world that today sound like delusion: that the Earth is a fragment of the Sun torn away by the collision of a comet; that it was actually born from the bosom of the water; that when the Sun goes out, the ground will be left in darkness; that someone wants to drill into the planet all the way to its center to study it from the inside; and, a few lines earlier, that certain bodies are not even solid—that the hardness we feel when touching them is mere appearance.
Pignotti did not invent any of this. The footnotes of the poem—those discrete lines at the end of the canto that one usually skips—give him away: the theory that bodies do not exist as substance comes from Berkeley; the observations on generation and nature come from Buffon, Bonnet, and company; the idea of cosmic collision and cosmogonic speculation points to Maupertuis and his Lettres philosophiques. Pignotti was not parodying street-town charlatans. He was parodying the most serious scientists in Europe.
Let's start with Berkeley. The Irish bishop did not say, as the poem oversimplifies, that "there is no body whatsoever" out of a whim: his immaterialism maintained that talking about a matter that exists independently of all perception is an empty idea—that esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived")—and that the only things we are certain exist are ideas and the minds that perceive them. To the common sense of any 18th-century coffeehouse, this was—literally—insane: Samuel Johnson's famous "I refute it thus," kicking a stone, is the most cited and least philosophical response in the history of philosophy. Pignotti jumps on that same easy mockery. But what Berkeley was really trying to resolve—what ontological status that which we do not directly perceive has—remains, three centuries later, one of the central problems of quantum physics and any information theory. Johnson's stone did not refute anything; it only proved that kicking is easier than thinking.
Let's move on to Buffon. The naturalist count, superintendent of the King's Garden, put forward in 1749, in the first volume of his Histoire Naturelle, the hypothesis that would so scandalize his contemporaries: that the planet was born as an incandescent fragment torn from the Sun by the impact of a comet, and that it cooled down in stages until life was possible. It is precisely the theory that Pignotti puts into the mouth of his ridiculous wise men. The Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne, which still had teeth to bite with, forced him to publicly recant the following year—there was no need for Ismaele's stick; the real Sorbonne already had its own. Almost thirty years later, with ecclesiastical censorship considerably more toothless, Buffon returned to the same hypothesis in his Époques de la Nature (1778). This time he accompanied it with something no one in France had dared to attempt: he heated iron spheres of various sizes, measured how long it took them to cool down to the temperature of a human hand, and mathematically extrapolated those times to the scale of an entire planet, concluding that the Earth was far older than the six thousand years permitted by biblical chronology. The method was, for its time, admirable. The result—around 75,000 years—was off by several orders of magnitude because Buffon had no way of knowing that the Earth's interior remains hot due to radioactivity, not thermal inertia. But the underlying logic—"let's measure the cooling to calculate the elapsed time"—is the same logic that, a century and a half later, would allow rocks to be dated by radioactive decay and establish that the planet is 4.5 billion years old. Buffon was wrong on the number, twice. He was right on the question, twice as well.
Bonnet completes the trio of "observations on generation" cited in the footnote. The Genevan naturalist defended the theory of preformation: that all living beings that will ever exist were already contained, in miniature, inside one another from the moment of Creation—an egg inside an egg inside an egg, until the end of time. It sounded, even to his contemporaries, like a metaphysical Russian doll. But Bonnet defended it because it solved a real problem that the science of his era did not know how to address: where, exactly, does the order of a living organism come from if it does not come pre-packaged beforehand? Modern genetics, with its information encoded in advance in DNA, is not Bonnet's preformation—but it shares the same uncomfortable intuition: that the plan of the organism must be somewhere before the organism exists.
And Maupertuis, the boldest of the four, is probably the one who best explains the most ridiculous line in the poem: the scholar who wants to "drill into the earth to the center" to study it from the inside. It is not a poetic hyperbole. In his Lettres philosophiques of 1752, Maupertuis seriously proposed—among other equally extravagant ideas, such as dissecting the brains of executed criminals to locate the soul, or founding a city dedicated exclusively to scientific experimentation without moral restrictions—the possibility of digging an extremely deep pit to empirically verify what the interior of the planet was made of. In his Vénus physique, a few years earlier, he had gone even further: he suggested that inheritance operates through material particles contributed by both parents that combine according to a sort of attraction—something dangerously close to saying that life organizes itself without the need for divine design to guide it step by step. Voltaire, who detested him, made him the protagonist of a mocking pamphlet called Diatribe du docteur Akakia (1752) solely to ridicule these ideas, including the pit. Ismaele's stick, deep down, wouldn't have done much that Voltaire's pen hadn't already done—and it is quite probable that Pignotti didn't even reach Maupertuis first-hand, but rather already chewed up by that very pamphlet: the mockery of the poemetto does not attack 18th-century science; it attacks the caricature that the philosophes themselves had made fashionable against their colleagues.
Therein lies the irony that the poem, occupied with its own comedy, fails to see: the four names that its footnotes cite as the source of the ridiculed theories are, with the 20th-century newspaper in hand, four of the thinkers who came closest to correct intuitions through completely wrong paths. Berkeley understood that matter as an autonomous substance is a more fragile idea than it seems. Buffon understood that the deep time of the planet had to be measured rather than taken for granted in a book. Bonnet understood that the order of the living needs to be explained, not just described. Maupertuis understood that inheritance was matter and combination, not a specific miracle. All four were wrong in almost every detail, and all four were right about the question.
If Pignotti's stick had truly existed and had roamed the salons of Paris instead of those of the Congo, it would have beaten all four with the same mechanical enthusiasm with which it beat the inquisitor and the Latin pedant of the poem. And that is where the satire, without realizing it, ends up being more honest than it intended: because deep down it does not distinguish—it cannot distinguish—between the charlatan who speaks nonsense because he has nothing better, and the naturalist who speaks nonsense because he is groping around, with the wrong tools, for something that no one can yet clearly see. Pignotti wanted to laugh at the pedantry of his century. Without knowing it, he left behind a fairly faithful catalogue of what the smartest people of that same century were seriously thinking about.
Co-created by me and the AI.
