The airport proudly bears the name of Ruđer Josip Bošković (1711.-1787.), a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, diplomat, poet, and Jesuit from Dubrovnik. He is an example of a "homo universalis," whose theoretical work laid the foundation for modern physics. His contributions to science and his extremely important role in the history of Dubrovnik, as well as his broader influence, are the reasons why Dubrovnik Airport bears his name.
Developed a molecular theory of matter
His atomic model of different orbitals appeared a century and a half before the model in which electrons orbit the nucleus, which was developed in 1913 by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whom Einstein considers one of the fathers of quantum mechanics.
He laid the foundations of modern field theory, preceding the "Theory of everything" by two centuries
In his theory of forces exposed in 1758, Bošković proposed the avant-garde idea of a unique natural force governing the universe. This force would be attractive or repulsive depending on its radius of action. In a way, this would be the synthesis resulting from adding up the four fundamental forces (the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force).
He postulated general relativity, later developed by Einstein
Friedrich Nietzsche called Bošković's work “the greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on Earth,” while Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize winner in physics, nicknamed him the “Croatian Leibniz.”
He was among the first to call Uranus a planet
Thanks to his method of determining the orbit of a comet from just three observations, Bošković was among the very first to establish the planetary nature of the strange celestial body, observed on March 13, 1781 by astronomer William Herschel, and hastily described as a comet. It later turned out that this celestial body is none other than the planet Uranus.
A crater on the Moon bears his name
His calculations made it possible to reinforce the dome of Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the spire of the Duomo in Milan. We owe him the construction of the achromatic telescope and the micrometer, the modeling of the Earth as a geoid, and the calculation of its dimensions.
He determined the Sun’s rotation period and diameter and measured the altitude of the troposphere
Bošković was a member of the Royal Society, the Paris Academy of Sciences, and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Attached to the service of the King of France and the Pope, he directed the Optics of the Royal Navy in Paris and founded the Brera Observatory near Milan.
He also led some diplomatic missions for his native Republic of Ragusa
Bošković’s importance is visible from the list of people with whom he corresponded, debated, or who quoted his works: Clairaut, Lalande, Voltaire, Bernoulli, Euler, D’Alambert, Lagrange, Laplace, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, Mendeleev, Tesla.