Hertha Sponer in the laboratory.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Lisa Lisco, Gift of Jost Lemmerich.
AIP is welcoming Elise Crull, a philosopher at the City College of New York, on Friday, March 20, to present a lecture in our Lyne Starling Trimble event series: “Hertha Sponer and the Path from Electron Diffraction to Wave/Particle Duality.” Though obscured in more heroic tales of the quantum revolution, Sponer’s spectroscopic work in Göttingen is exemplary of the crucial role that experimenters played in that history. RSVP today to attend.
Other Trimble events coming this spring
AIP’s grant-in-aid program for research in the history of the physical sciences is welcoming applications through Wednesday, April 15. We are pleased to announce that we have raised the maximum amount of these grants from $2,500 to $3,000, and we are continuing to accept applications for up to a maximum of $6,000 for research on the history of the physical sciences in industrial settings. For further information, see our website.
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History from Physics Today
- Athene Donald, interviewed February 4 and 5, 2025, by Joseph Martin
- Edwin Krupp, interviewed November 13, 2025, by David DeVorkin
- Alex Lips, interviewed November 19 and 20, 2024, by Joseph Martin and Wilson Poon
IRIS seismograph used in a teacher-training program that supported cultivating interest in earth sciences in schoolchildren.
Photo by Anna Doel, who helped bring the IRIS records to AIP.
We are excited to share that AIP recently acquired the institutional records of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a consortium of US universities with research programs in the field. IRIS was formed in 1984 to develop and operate the infrastructure needed for the acquisition and distribution of high-quality seismic data. In 2023, it merged with UNAVCO to form the EarthScope Consortium. The still-unprocessed collection spans from IRIS’s formation to the early 2000s and consists mostly of paper records, along with physical and digital photographs and other born-digital records.
IRIS was influential in the world of geoscience and global scientific collaboration in the late Cold War period, and its records could provide insights into not only the science of seismology but also geopolitics, particularly around nuclear testing and nonproliferation efforts. IRIS was also notable for constructing data banks that anticipated high volumes of data; its commitment to open, worldwide access to data sets; and its teacher training program.
Spencer Klein, of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, digs a slot hole for a radio antenna for the ARIANNA (Antarctic Ross Ice-Shelf Antenna Neutrino Array) prototype station in Moore’s Bay on the Ross Ice Shelf (about 100 miles south of McMurdo station) in Antarctica. ARIANNA was a pioneering experiment to look for radio pulses created when ultra-high energy neutrinos interacted in the ice shelf.
Thorsten Stezelberger, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. CC BY 4.0.
Here in the Washington, DC region, we experienced more snow and ice than we typically get in February, but thankfully not quite this much! We recently received this photo through our photo submission tool, and it is now part of AIP’s Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. If you’ve ever snapped a photo of your research group celebrating a submission of a paper, your mentor at the whiteboard explaining a tricky concept, or your labmates hanging out at a conference dinner or going on a hike together, you are in possession of records of the physical sciences that may be worthy of preservation in our archives.
