Will Thomas
@williamthomas
Director of Research in History, Policy, and Culture at the American Institute of Physics. Author of Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940-1960. Views expressed are my own.
The Seventh AIP Early-Career Conference for Historians of the Physical Sciences will take place in Toronto, Canada, June 21-25, 2027. Supplementary travel funding provided. The call for submissions is now open and closes November 15. Details here: www.aip.org/history/earl...
Weaver's one of my favorite figures to research. You can pick up hints of his Carroll fascination in his writing.
The semiannual AIP History Newsletter is done! @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social wrote the feature "Scenes from the Making of Astrophysics." Plus: introducing our postdoc Vince Femia and inaugural Helleman grant winners, updates from grant-in-aid recipients, and more! aip.brightspotcdn.com/7c/34/87c536...
And when I say longstanding, I mean it. Creating a "source book in the history of modern physics" was literally point #1 in the Dec. 1, 1960 proposal that led to our establishment.
Just perusing an old issue of the Fermilab newsletter, as one does on an unseasonably cool Sunday, and ran across this wonderfully casual coverage of the November Revolution history.fnal.gov/criers/11-21...
Poking around the Truman library photograph collections, I have discovered that first NSF director Alan Waterman knew how to party www.trumanlibrary.gov/photograph-r...
DC friends! Registration is open for our last Lyne Starling Trimble public event of this spring: Dava Sobel Wednesday, May 27 "At Mme. Curie's Lab: Radioactivity and a Place for Women in Science" More details here: www.aip.org/history/dava...
Now available: David DeVorkin's April 17 Trimble lecture, "The Quiet Genius of George Carruthers." David's among the most skilled and prolific historians of astronomy we have. He's been through some ill health, so it was extra wonderful to have him with us. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CEh...
I probably spend way too much time laboring over things like photo selection, but when you have a playground like AIP's Segrè collection it's irresistible. I've always thought young JRO has a Bob Dylan vibe, and this parallel was too good to pass up.
Like, seriously, maybe we shouldn't do this sort of thing within two weeks of introducing the concept of "pi" (itself introduced within a unit on the concept of proportional relationships). This is sixth grade, people.
Today AIP Helleman Fellow, philosopher of physics Ruward Mulder at UC Irvine #HPS, paid us a visit while he's on a month-long visit with the HPS group at Pittsburgh. We found him some folks he could talk shop with, and we offered a quick tour of the AIP Niels Bohr Library & Archives.
A great week at AIP! Mid-week we celebrated three oral histories with Robert Oppenheimer opening to the public. With MIT's Dave Kaiser, biographer Kai Bird, and grandchildren Charles Oppenheimer and Dorothy Oppenheimer Vanderford. AIP archivist Allison Buser did amazing work on this initiative.
If you'd like to *listen* to Thomas Kuhn interview Robert Oppenheimer, we've got you covered: repository.aip.org/node/151144 Audio quality is a little iffy, so you'll need the transcript: repository.aip.org/node/150787 More on this soon!
Before nuking my Twitter account from orbit, I went in to rescue my old budget request reaction meme. Allegedly it was once spotted in a federal budget office.
As much as I lament that we'll probably never see the "Cold War physics bubble" book, I am enjoying Dave's turn as a primordial-black-holes-as-dark-matter-candidate advocate. Truly a man of many talents.
If you are in DC, one week from today the amazing Elise Crull from the CCNY philosophy department is doing an evening talk at AIP about Hertha Sponer and the role experimentalists played in the jump from electron diffraction to wave/particle duality. #HPS Register here: www.aip.org/history/elis...
Many good lines from philosopher/physicist Abner Shimony, who really carried the torch for Bell's theorem from 1964 to '68. "The more I read it, the more brilliant it seemed. And I realized, ‘This is no kooky paper. This is something very great.’” More on Shimony: www.bu.edu/cphs/about/a...
A subject of particular recent interest is the Wu-Shaknov experiment of 1949/50, which tested entanglement without (apparently) trying to. Its epistemological status vis-a-vis the later, better-known tests of Bell's theorem is something that deserves attention. Same with Kocher's '67 experiment.
This sent me to brush up on Einstein's "personality rights". These were litigated in the US in Hebrew University of Jerusalem v General Motors, wherein a CA judge ruled personality rights endure no more than 50 years after death. The case involved this pic: More info: cdas.com/einstein-pub...
Well, he and his wife should indeed be better known for their translation of Agricola's De Re Metallica
Here I feel it's worth pointing out that in opinion polls scientists have a 30-point trust advantage over journalists. While everyone has much to learn from everyone else, I want to hear much more about how journalists could learn about trust from scientists www.pewresearch.org/science/2023...
HEP funding is another great chart. This is from DOE. Now, the SSC funding bump here was largely going to construction, but there were a lot of marooned physicists, and, anecdotally, many ended up on Wall Street.
The AIP stats team has released its latest data of physics & astronomy PhD trends, with breakdown by gender. What is extraordinary to me is how clearly the overall trends exhibit an important gender dimension, and that that story is quite different between physics and astronomy.
Having grown up a couple miles from a ski jump in Minnesota, I'm a little surprised to see that this was evidently some sort of regional strength? There's not much of it in the Rockies? www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olymp...