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News notice: The American Physical Society is currently accepting nominations for its Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics . The deadline to submit a nomination package is June 2, 2025.

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The Royal Institution will host a workshop next week on the origins and development of geophysics. A discipline that, at its emergence, was viewed as a poor applied cousin of old-school natural philosophy and cutting-edge fundamental physics, has evolved into a powerhouse of scientific knowledge about the Earth. Researchers have been looking into the discipline’s history for decades, and this workshop will showcase the latest work of scholars from around the world. AIP’s former history director Greg Good, a lifelong specialist in the Earth sciences, will be among them.

Watch: Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University) will deliver a keynote address , “Rethinking the Origins of Plate Tectonics,” which will be available to view by livestream at 7pm London time. Tickets are also on sale to attend in person.

Keynote abstract: Many historians have thought that US Navy funding of oceanography paved the way for plate tectonic theory. By funding extensive investigations of the deep ocean, Navy support enabled scientists to discover and understand sea-floor magnetic stripes, the association of the deep trenches with deep-focus earthquakes, and other key features. Historian of science and geologist Naomi Oreskes presents a different view: the major pieces of plate-tectonic theory were in place in the 1930s, and military secrecy in fact prevented the coalescence of plate tectonics, delaying it for three decades.

Background: Workshop co-organizer Katy Duncan shared with AIP the vision for the event and how it came together:

“The idea for this workshop emerged quite organically, as perhaps all good workshops do! Miguel Ohnesorge and I were chatting at the Cambridge History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) department’s end-of-term party in December 2024. Miguel is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at HPS Cambridge but about to take up an assistant professorship at Boston University. I am currently based at the Royal Institution (Ri) as a Postdoctoral Freer Fellow, also an affiliate in the HPS department.

We’d long shared overlapping interests in geophysics (his work on the shape of the Earth and measurement in seismology; mine on atmospheric electricity) but hadn’t found a chance to collaborate during our PhDs, even though we both worked under Hasok Chang. With Miguel moving to Boston this summer and my involvement in the Ri’s Discover200 campaign—marking the 200th anniversaries of the Friday Evening Discourses, Christmas Lectures, and the isolation of benzene—we realised we had a brief but meaningful window to work together.

The workshop aims to explore how the discipline of geophysics emerged. Prior to the 19th century, many subjects that we today would consider geophysical were being studied in very different ways across very different fields ranging from astronomy to natural history. Our hope for the workshop is to get clearer on how geophysics came to be a more-or-less cohesive field of science across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Part of the motivation here is of course just understanding the history, but we think this perspective will also help us understand better in what sense different geophysical theories, methods, and problems cohere or differ. That should be interesting to geophysicists and philosophers studying scientific methodology.

As it happens, the Ri is the perfect place to host this event due to its own role in the emergence of geophysics. Its Discourse series is where many ideas in geophysics were platformed, debated, and discussed in the heart of London from the mid-19th century onwards. Many big names in science spoke at a Discourse during this incredible formative period. George Airy and George Darwin, for example, presented their landmark work on the tides, A.E.H. Love his foundational work on geodynamics, and John Milne told his audience about the very first successes in learning about Earth’s interior by recording seismic waves.

There were so many on Earth sciences that they formed three volumes in Stanley Runcorn’s Library of Science series. More than that, the 1958 Christmas Lectures for children were also explicitly aligned with the International Geophysical Year, and since then other series for children have focused on our world and how it works.

In my own work, I have found incredible utility in studying William Thomson’s (Lord Kelvin’s) Discourse on atmospheric electricity. It is an incredible privilege to be able to stand in the very same theatre where he spoke and demonstrated how it is that “normal” air is electrical and better grasp the challenges he found in making this invisible charge perceptible to the public.

Miguel’s work focuses on geodesy and seismology, and many major advances in both fields were first announced right here at the Ri during Discourses. The more we explored, the more it seemed like the Ri was an ideal home for an event that takes a broad, interdisciplinary view of geophysics, incorporating historical, philosophical, and scientific perspectives.

The real challenge proved to be organising everything in time. So many people were interested in attending that we had to double capacity (and book a bigger room!). We wondered how we were going to pull off a workshop of this size, whilst capturing the breadth of approaches to exploring geophysics, so we shared our issue with interested attendees. Their ideas led us to introduce lightning talks to accommodate more speakers and short talks from curators and museum professionals in order to connect researchers with geophysical collections from a range of UK based institutions. Our keynote address, by Naomi Oreskes, was also upgraded to a public livestreamed talk in the historic Ri Theatre; the same theatre where Discourses continue to take place today.

The resulting programme is far beyond what either Miguel or I could have envisaged only a few months ago. We were very fortunate and grateful to receive generous funding from the Freer Trust and the University of Cambridge, without whom this event would not have been possible, and to select attendees who contributed a voluntary registration fee to provide more spaces for early-career researchers and unwaged academics. We have over forty attendees from five continents joining us on Monday, and we hope this event will be a step towards fostering a community of geophysically inclined scholars.”

The Program

Talks

Alisa Bokulich (Boston University), The Philosophical Culture of the U.S. Coast Survey & the Rise of Geophysics: 1816-1874

Pablo Lima (University of Seville), The Making of Oceanography: Natural Models and Cross-scalar Reasoning in the Mediterranean Sea

Katy Duncan (Royal Institution), Influence and Instrument: The Fair Weather Problem in Atmospheric Electricity (1850-1930)

Gregory Good (West Virginia University), The Astronomical (and other) Backgrounds of Geophysics

Teru Miyake (Nanyang Technological University), Untangling Seismology: The Göttingen Group 1907-1914

Miguel Ohnesorge (University of Cambridge), Quantification in Geophysics

Robert-Jan Wille (Utrecht University), The Geopolitics of Atmospheric Physics

Amelia Urry (University of Cambridge), ‘Deep Uncertainty’ in the Cryosphere

Lightning talks

Gabriel Târziu (LMU Munich), Rethinking the Importance of Model Hierarchies in Climate Science

David Pyle (University of Oxford), Sensing the Unquiet Earth - Frank Perret and the Monitoring of Restless Volcanoes

Nanina Föhr (LMU Munich), A Committee for the Ages: The Coordination of Geologic Time Measurement in the First Half of the 20th Century

James Ladyman (University of Bristol), Triangulation - Geophysics and the Scientific Method

Xiaoyue Hu (Peking University), The International Geophysical Year and the Development of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in China (1950s–1980s)

Museum and archive lightning presentations

Charlotte New (Royal Institution)

Joshua Nall (Whipple Museum, Department of HPS, University of Cambridge)

Anne Barrett (Imperial College London)

Rebekah Higgitt (National Museums Scotland)

Alexandra Rose (Science Museum London)

Anna Doel
American Institute of Physics
adoel@aip.org

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