The AIP history team launched our Weekly Edition last year in part to help promote a better understanding of the quantity and quality of the work that historians of the physical sciences are producing. While we were initially uncertain if there would be enough material to sustain a weekly cadence, it has turned out it is much more than a weekly publication can handle! As we enter 2026, we would like to present the abstracts of just some of the scholarly articles we did not have a chance to feature but very much would have liked to. All of these articles are open access, so please click through and enjoy.

The polar expedition of the airship “Italia” (1928): A chapter in the history of physics
Matteo Leone and Nadia Robotti, Physics in Perspective, 2025, doi:10.1007/s00016-025-00338-9

The “Italia” airship expedition of 1928 under the command of General Umberto Nobile was the first air expedition to the North Pole with important scientific, and especially physics, objectives. This paper will use unpublished archival documents and other primary sources to examine the extent to which these objectives were achieved, focusing on the physical research in the pack ice and on board the airship. We will also discuss the fate of the scientific equipment brought to the Pole and the role of the two physicists who took part in the expedition. It is known that when the airship hit the pack ice, ten crew members, including General Nobile and physicist František Běhounek, were trapped in the ice. Unfortunately, the other six crew members were trapped in the still-drifting airship hull, which disappeared over the Arctic Ocean. They were never found. One of them was the Italian physicist Aldo Pontremoli, whose passion for flying and scientific career will be traced here to discuss why and with what purpose he was on board this fateful flight.

The prediction and interpretation of singularities and black holes: From Einstein and Schwarzschild to Penrose and Wheeler
Dennis Lehmkuhl, Physics in Perspective 27, no. 2, 2025: 176–209, doi:10.1007/s00016-025-00331-2

The Schwarzschild solution was the first exact solution to Einstein’s 1915 field equations, found by Karl Schwarzschild as early as 1916. And yet, physicists, mathematicians and philosophers have struggled for decades with the interpretation of the Schwarzschild solution and the two singularities appearing in it when it is written in polar coordinates. This article distinguishes between eight different ways in which the two singularities have been interpreted between 1916 and the late 1960s, when Penrose’s first singularity theorem shed new and lasting light on the interpretation of the Schwarzschild solution.

Tachyons before tachyons: Lev Strum (1890–1936) and superluminal velocities
Helge Kragh, European Physical Journal H 50, article 9, 2025, doi:10.1140/epjh/s13129-025-00103-z

No particle or signal carrying information can travel at a speed exceeding that of light in vacuum. Although this has for a long time been accepted as a law of nature, prior to Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity the possibility of superluminal motion of electrons was widely discussed by Arnold Sommerfeld and other physicists. Besides, it is not obvious that special relativity rules out such motion under all circumstances. From approximately 1965 to 1985, the hypothesis of tachyons moving faster than light was seriously entertained by a minority of physicists. This paper reviews the early history concerning faster-than-light signals and pays particular attention to the ideas proposed in the 1920s by the little-known Ukrainian physicist Lev Strum (Shtrum). As he pointed out in a paper of 1923, within the framework of relativity it is possible for a signal to move superluminally without violating the law of causality. Part of this article is devoted to the personal and scientific biography of the undeservedly neglected Strum, whose career was heavily—and eventually fatally—influenced by the political situation in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Remarkably, to the limited extent that Strum is known today, it is as a literary figure in a novel and not as a real person.

Theoretical discovery, experiment, and controversy in the Aharonov-Bohm effect: An oral history interview
Yakir Aharonov and Guy Hetzroni, European Physical Journal H 50, article 16, 2025, doi:10.1140/epjh/s13129-025-00107-9

This oral history interview provides Yakir Aharonov’s perspective on the theoretical discovery of the Aharonov-Bohm effect in 1959, during his PhD studies in Bristol with David Bohm, the reception of the effect, the efforts to test it empirically (up to Tonomura’s experiment), and some of the debates regarding the existence of the effect and its interpretation. The interview also discusses related later developments until the 1980s, including modular momentum and Berry’s phase. It includes recollections from meetings with Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman, and Chen-Ning Yang, also mentioning John Bell, Robert Chambers, Werner Ehrenberg, Sir Charles Frank, Wendell Furry, Gunnar Källén, Maurice Pryce, Nathan Rosen, John Wheeler, and Eugene Wigner.

Wheeler the storyteller: On the uses and drawbacks of history for life
Stefano Furlan, European Physical Journal H 50, article 17, 2025, doi:10.1140/epjh/s13129-025-00109-7

When a physicist evokes the past, historians typically start rubbing their hands, waiting for their chance to correct the naive scientist who seems to intrude into their job. In this attitude too, however, there is a form of naiveté that can prevent us from appreciating and properly weighing many aspects of history. The manifold uses of the past by the physicists themselves, in particular, remain a neglected topic. This paper intends to show how an eminent figure such as John A. Wheeler (1911–2008), also thanks to his long life and career, created a highly peculiar—and, communication-wise, very effective—mixture of personal experience and reminiscences, historical pathos and anecdotes, guiding ideas and metaphors. The relevance of such an amalgam is not limited to the employment of rhetoric in science, since it shaped Wheeler’s influential research programs and suggestions throughout decades, besides offering a powerfully evocative and captivating communicative model for the speculative frontiers of physics. While all this is meant as a study in the way Wheeler made use of the past within his activities as a physicist, it can also provide us with a critical lesson about today’s construction of pseudo-historical narratives that try to legitimize bold proposals in lack of empirical results.

Competing for collaboration on particle accelerators in the multipolar Cold War world
Barbara Hof, Grigoris Panoutsopoulos, and Climério Silva Neto, Physics in Perspective 27, no. 3, 2025, 296–330, doi:10.1007/s00016-025-00336-x

This article explores the entanglement of scientific collaboration and Cold War geopolitics through the lens of four major particle accelerator complexes: CERN (Europe), JINR/Dubna and IHEP/Serpukhov (Soviet Union), and NAL/Fermilab (United States). Despite their scientific significance, the origins and evolution of their exchange programs remain understudied. Moving beyond the conventional East-West binary, we adopt a multipolar framework to analyze how these four institutions forged enduring collaborations. From the first decade of the Cold War through the 1970s détente, bilateral agreements enabled the growing flow of personnel, equipment, and knowledge between CERN, JINR, Serpukhov, and Fermilab, thereby crossing national borders and ideological divides. These institutions operated strategically within the contested arena of the Cold War constellation, where competition for scientific leadership paradoxically fostered collaboration. Although plans for a joint global accelerator remained unrealized, our analysis highlights how international collaboration evolved into a nuanced, multilevel, and multipolar interplay—one that was shaped as much by scientific ambition as by persistent asymmetries and power dynamics.

Cleaning a dark matter detector: A case of ontological and normative elusiveness
Jaco de Swart and Annemarie Mol, Social Studies of Science, 2025, doi:10.1177/03063127251361158

Laboratory sciences crucially depend on the cleanliness of experiments. But what is clean? In this article, we show that the salience of the valuation clean emerges through its relation to a particular ontological repertoire. Our case is the XENONnT experiment in the Gran Sasso Mountains of Italy, designed to detect dark matter in the form of hypothetical WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). In this experiment, dirt presents a significant disruption, as contaminations can mimic the signals of WIMPs, and electronegative molecules risk erasing such signals. The idiosyncratic cleanliness required makes the practice of cleaning the XENONnT detector exceedingly difficult. So far, the ontological question “do WIMPs exist?” remains open, which means that the normative question “is the detector clean enough?” cannot be answered either. In addition, more cleaning will make the detector sensitive to a background of unremovable neutrinos—hence irredeemably dirty. With the normative goal of a “clean detector” out of reach, the ontological question “do WIMPs exist?” is bound to remain open as well. Alternative experiments therefore hunt for different hypothetical dark matter candidates, with different equipment, requiring different kinds of cleanliness. At the same time, the XENONnT experiment must navigate tensions between its own cleanliness goals and rules meant to ensure the environmental cleanliness of the Gran Sasso National Park. Cleaning turns out to be dirty. This leads us to ask: Which goods deserve to be cherished, and, intertwined with that, which realities deserve to be cared for?

A planetarium for the nation’s capital
Jieun Shin and David DeVorkin, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 55, no. 1, 2025, 1–36, doi:10.1525/hsns.2025.55.1.1

The half-century-long effort to establish a planetarium in Washington, DC, reflects the evolving intersections of science education, national identity, and geopolitical strategy in twentieth-century America. Beginning in the 1920s, initial proposals aimed to educate the public about astronomy through advancements in German optical technology. However, as the Cold War intensified, the planetarium project took on greater significance, becoming a symbol of American technological prowess and a strategic tool amid ideological competition with the Soviet Union. The culmination of these efforts was the opening of the “Spacearium” within the National Air and Space Museum in 1976, coinciding with the US Bicentennial. This study explores how the development of the Spacearium was not just a scientific or educational endeavor but reflected broader cultural and political currents, ultimately serving as a platform for the United States to assert its leadership in science and technology on the global stage.

William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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