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.
Will Thomas
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In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, for Pride Month summer intern Amelie Heying excerpted an oral history with Leeds food physicist Megan Povey, discussing her science, activism, and mid-career gender transition. Joe Martin (@randomjetship.bsky.social) & Wilson Poon conducted the interview. 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
If you'd like to know more about John Trump, check out a brief profile I wrote on him in @physicstoday.aip.org a decade ago now. And for more on his many peers in the World War II milieu, check out my book, Rational Action.
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HISTORY OF PHYSICS
Peter Debye was a Dutch physical-chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, in 1936, for developing a method to determine how electrical charges are distributed in a molecules.
His name is associated in physics to the Debye model of crystals that is used to
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Hello! Please pre-order my new book, Necessary Inventions: Roger Bacon, the Middle Ages, and the Making of Modern Science. You can get 40% off if you order by June 12; just use the code PENN-SUMMER26. www.pennpress.org/978151282988...
the issue of Nuncius in which @michielbron.bsky.social & I write ab/ oil firms, scientific instruments & the Manhattan Project is now out. what a line-up! don't miss (oa) Deborah J. Warner, Simon Werrett, Klaus Hentschel, Liba Taub, David Pantalony, @nescioquid.bsky.social
brill.com/view/journal...
Just an aside to say that I'm very happy with Capital Weather's new independence from the Washington Post and to receive my morning weather email again without any attempt to "drive me to the website." It's free but I'm pleased to kick in $8 a month to support great, publicly minded professionals.
A couple dudes from Hoover wrote a weird article for WaPo about John Trump, Donald's MIT physicist uncle. While a genuinely interesting guy, the article sort of implies he was a uniquely important figure rather than one of a sizable set of leaders who built bridges between labs and the military.
In 1852, the astronomer Nils Haqvin Selander travelled past the Arctic to complete a massively time consuming and difficult project – measuring the shape of the Earth. But why was this so important? And why does measurement matter to science at all? Read the Essay by Miguel Ohnesorge to find out
