A diagram of an apparatus that Carl Kocher used during his doctoral research in the mid-1960s to test the correlated properties of entangled photons. John Clauser and Stuart Freedman would later adapt Kocher’s apparatus in a landmark test of Bell’s theorem.
Carl A. Kocher, “Quantum Entanglement of Optical Photons: The First Experiment, 1964–67,” Frontiers in Quantum Science and Technology 3, 2024. CC BY 4.0.
The digital version of AIP’s semiannual History Newsletter is now available on our website. This issue’s feature article looks at scholarship on the long history of efforts to test what is now called quantum entanglement, and at those experiments’ role in bringing research on foundational quantum behaviors into the mainstream of physics. Other articles include a look at last summer’s Sixth AIP Early Career Conference and Fifth International Conference on the History of Quantum Physics in Brazil, a call for photographs and memoirs, reports from grant-in-aid recipients, and memories of pathbreaking Einstein scholar John Stachel.
Thursday, February 26: AIP and the Smithsonian Institution will co-host an evening panel discussion at our event space in downtown Washington, DC, called “City of Knowledge.” Focusing on the history of science in Washington, the scheduled panelists are Greg Good, Teasel Muir-Harmony, and Sara Grossman. This event will be in-person only. Please watch for registration information soon.
Wednesday, May 27: Best-selling science writer Dava Sobel will present a lecture in AIP’s Lyne Starling Trimble public event series, titled “At Mme. Curie’s Laboratory: Radioactivity and a Place for Women in Science.” RSVPs will open this spring.
Postponed: We regrettably had to cancel last month’s planned Trimble lecture by David DeVorkin, “The Quiet Genius of George Carruthers,” and we hope it will be possible to reschedule soon.
This month from the AIP History Weekly Edition
This blog from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives provides a behind the scenes look at the history and collections we preserve and make accessible. Explore more posts here.
AIP Foundation inspires transformative philanthropy that empowers physical scientists to make a global impact. We support hundreds of thousands of scientists in the physical sciences community, enabling breakthroughs that change our lives.
- David Simpson, interviewed April 15, 21, 24, and 29, 2025, by Anna Doel
Following the trend from last spring, we have continued to receive large numbers of compelling applications for our Grants-in-Aid Program for research in the history of the physical sciences. Thanks to the availability of new funding sources, we were able to award more grants than ever before, and we hope to continue making similar numbers of awards in future cycles. The next deadline for applications will be April 15.
Awardees from this cycle are:
Sara Bassanelli (University of Pavia / Politecnico di Torino): To support research at archives in the United States on the international negotiation of technical standards.
Tathagat Bhatia (MIT): To support research at AIP’s Niels Bohr Library & Archives on information and data management in the Cold War-era Earth sciences.
Luca Campagnoni (University of Padua): To support work in the United States to create a more unified archival portrait of cosmic ray physicist Bruno Rossi.
Silvia Castillo Vergara (University of Toronto): To support research at various US archives concerning the emergence of quantum information science as a subfield of physics.
Penelope Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse): To support work at archives in the UK and Monaco related to Jacques Cousteau’s research vessel Calypso.
Sharad Pandian (Princeton University): To support archival research at the National Agricultural Library and Wright State University on human calorimetry.
Kapil Patil (Shiv Nadar University): To support research at the US National Archives on the Atomic Energy Commission’s international technical assistance efforts.
Nithyanand Rao (University of California, San Diego): To support archival research at Virginia Tech and the University of Houston on E. C. George Sudarshan.
Ohad Reiss-Sorokin (Institute for Advanced Study): To support research at various archives on Thomas Kuhn and the development of the history of science discipline at Princeton University.
Xiaona Wang (University of Warwick): To support research in Europe and Asia on the use of evidence from China during the disputes over Isaac Newton’s cosmology.
Bethan Winter (German Historical Institute (Warsaw) in Prague): To support research at various archives in the UK on British-Soviet relations in nuclear fusion research.
In addition to these grants, we were able to support three projects in association with work AIP is undertaking under a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to document the history of women in the physical sciences.
Bárbara de Almeida Silvério (Federal University of Bahia): To support archival research at Harvard University on Annie Jump Cannon’s methodologies in stellar classification.
Michelle Frank (independent writer): To support research at various archives as part of a continuing project on experimental physicist Chien-Shiung Wu.
Jolene Johnson (University of Wisconsin-River Falls): To support oral histories and other research on women associated with physics at the University of Minnesota.
Finally, we may announce more grants from this cycle this spring, pending the availability of additional funding.
