The Sixth AIP Early-Career Conference for Historians of the Physical Sciences is taking place August 4 to 9 in Salvador, Brazil. We began convening these conferences in 2011 to give young scholars focused on the history of the physical sciences an opportunity to share their work and to help bring them together into a global community.

Recognizing that this community is very much a global one, these events have been held away from our headquarters in the Washington, DC, area beginning with the fourth iteration in 2018, which was convened in conjunction with the Third International Conference on the History of Physics in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain. The fifth took place two years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark, hosted by our friends at the Niels Bohr Archive. This time around, our hosts are the members of the history group at the Physics Institute of the Federal University of Bahia.

AIP is pleased to support this conference financially, including by providing travel funding for participants. This year, the conference is also benefitting from the support of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). And we are once again joined in our sponsorship by the Inter-Union Commission for the History and Philosophy of Physics, which also supports the annual International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Early Career Prize for History of Physics that is presented at the conference.

A notable feature of these conferences is that they are not only for early-career scholars; they are organized by younger scholars as well. The industrious chair of this year’s organizing committee has been Climério Silva Neto. The other members are Duim Huh, Jinyan Liu, Jean-Philippe Martinez, Carla Almeida, and Elena Schaa. Will Thomas and Rebecca Charbonneau sat in on planning meetings on behalf of AIP and helped with the organizing.

Other scholars who are participating as commentators and roundtable participants are Olival Freire, Jr., Ivã Gurgel, Thiago Hartz, Alexei Kojevnikov, Roberto Lalli, Gisela Mateos, Daniela Monaldi, Katemari Rosa, Indianara Silva, and Richard Staley.

Almost immediately following this year’s conference, the Federal University of Bahia is also hosting the Fifth International Conference on the History of Quantum Physics (HQ5), which we will spotlight next week.

IUPAP Early Career Prize Awardees

The 2024 and 2025 awardees of the IUPAP Early Career Prize will present talks on August 7.

Joanna Behrman (2024), From passion to profession: Studying women in the history of physics

Barbara Hof (2025), Fusion incomplete? International collaboration in plasma physics and fusion research, 1950s–1980s

Lyne Starling Trimble Lectures

The conference will also feature two keynote lectures that will be recorded and made available as part of AIP’s Lyne Starling Trimble series .

Gisela Mateos (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Physics on the move: Technical assistance for development in Latin America

Abstract: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its technical assistance programs set in place a machinery that mobilized experts in the field of nuclear science and technology. Established in 1957, it became an essential tool for the internationalization and standardization of atomic technologies and practices and for promoting geopolitical influence in the Third World. One of Latin America’s first IAEA technical assistance activities was the Mobile Radioisotope Exhibition, which began in Mexico in 1959. It marks the beginning of a series of programs that mobilized people, knowledge, and materialities. This talk will delve into how IAEA’s resources were leveraged through technical assistance programs for local scientific and institutional goals during the 1960s and 1970s, embedded in the discourse of development, the intersection of international scientific collaboration, political interests, and technologies.

Olival Freire Jr. (Universidade Federal da Bahia & CNPq, Brazil), Science, foundations, and technology: Lessons from the history of the hundred years of quantum mechanics

Abstract: Quantum mechanics emerged laden with issues and doubts about its foundations and interpretation. However, nobody in the 1920s and 1930s dared to conjecture that research on such issues would open the doors to developments so huge as to require the term second quantum revolution to describe them. On the one hand, the new theory saw its scope of applications widen in various domains including atoms, molecules, light, the interaction between light and matter, relativistic effects, field quantization, nuclear physics, and solid state and particle physics. On the other hand, there were debates on alternative interpretations, the status of statistical predictions, the completeness of the theory, the underlying logic, mathematical structures, the understanding of measurements, and the transition from the quantum to the classical description. Initially, there seemed to be a coexistence between these two orders of issues, without any interaction between them. However, the connections among debates on foundations, scientific achievements, and potential technological applications opened the doors for a new chapter in quantum history, a chapter many call quantum technologies. In this talk we exploit the connections among scientific achievements, foundational debates, and technological applications exhibited by quantum mechanics throughout its history.

Speakers on the program

Ricardo Ribeiro, First phase of the Brazilian nuclear program, 1946–1955

Victor Luiz China Gonçalves, The uses of computers in solid-state physics research at the University of São Paulo, ca. 1960–1969

Mylena Gaspar Amoedo, The history of decoherence from the perspectives of the theoretical contributions of Brazilian physicists Amir Caldeira and Luiz Davidovich

Sara Bassanelli, The diplomacy of standardization: Negotiating international electrical units from the 1930s to the 1960s

Michiel Bron, How to deal with a nuclear petro-state? Geopolitical consequences of an intertwined history of nuclear and oil

Janna K. Mueller, The unburning Sun: Solar theories and physical astronomy around 1800

Rebecka Mikaela Mähring, Disciplining photographs: Labor organization and photography at the Royal Greenwich Observatory

Eun-Joo Ahn, Invisible workers and invisible place: Making of a modern astronomical observatory in Southern California in the early twentieth century

Poliana Martins, Gendered labor and glass plates: The Harvard women behind the H-R diagram

Thiago Faustino, Before Charles Goodyear’s vulcanization: South American indigenous material knowledge and the rise of early rubber research in France, 1743–1791

Anxo Vidal Nogueira, Diversity in uniform: A tale of two astronomical instruments in Santiago de Compostela across the Francoist regime.

Lingzhao Meng, The establishment of the Luoxueshan laboratory and the early development of cosmic-ray research in China

Madison Renner, Big island, small world: Maintaining atmospheric access on Hawai’i throughout the history of the Keeling curve

Robert Naylor, Rolando García: Refugee, radical, climate’s attorney at law

Barbara Mercier, A numerical experiment: From weather forecasting to climate modelling

Megan Briers, Gender and the construction of 19th-century British eclipse expeditions

Charnell Chasten Long, Recovering Carolyn Parker’s contributions to physics, 1917–1966

Mar Rivera Colomer, Revisiting the foundations: Voices from the margins

S. Prashant Kumar, The symmetry eaters: Group theory and intellectual property in relativistic quantum mechanics

Emily Philippi, Philosophical discussion and interpretation of quantum physics in the GDR

Beñat Monfort Urkizu, A posteriori theory adjustments in the early universe cosmology: On the viability of cosmic inflation

Colleen Seidel, “Frauen beobachten oft besser, Männer machen Theorien daraus” (“Women often observe better, men theorise”): Representations of female scientists in school and university textbooks for physics in (West) Germany, ca. 1960–2020

Lórien MacEnulty, Are illustrations in physics androcentric? A historical and feminist analysis of visual representation of superexchange in materials

Siyuan Zhang, The evolvement and its dynamics of high-resolution-power spectroscopes in studying the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum, 1920s–1930s

Sofia Guilhem Basilio, Letters on causality: Debates between Erwin Schrödinger and Hans Reichenbach

Bernadette Lessel, Quantum pioneers and classical field theorists: Revisiting their interconnectedness

Francisco Calderón, Inconsistencies in quantum field theories: Replacement vs. refinement?

Gautier Depambour, From classical to quantum optics: New lights on light

Silvia Castillo Vergara, Information, computation, and the foundations of quantum mechanics: John Wheeler’s influence at the Center for Theoretical Physics, 1976–1987

William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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