Beginning Sunday, the European Society for the History of Science and the History of Science Society are holding a joint meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland. It will be an enormous gathering of scholars with interests spanning across scientific fields and periods of history. From AIP, Anna Doel is attending and participating in a roundtable discussion on Tuesday titled “Sources Beyond the Archive.” Here we would also like to spotlight just some of the other sessions that are in our own bailiwick of the modern physical sciences.

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Monday, July 13

Transient Scientific Institutions: The International Polar Years in Comparative Perspectives
Chair: Urban Wråkberg

Ronald Doel, Transient versus permanent institutions: Re-examining the impact of the Second International Polar Year, 1932–33
Julia Lajus, How and why oceanography did not fit into the program of the Second International Polar Year, 1932–33

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Making Global Temperature across Land, Ice, and Oceans
Organizer: Richard Staley | Chair: Tom Simpson

Sam Robinson, Making oceanic climate
Alexis Rider, Freezing temperature: Ice as an instrument and proxy in climate science
Richard Staley, Picking proxies in the making of global climate histories

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Emergence and Interpretation of the Principle of Energy Conservation in the Long 19th Century
Organizers: Shaul Katzir and Scott A. Walter | Chair: Isobel Falconer

Kenneth Caneva, Kuhn revisited: On the emergence of conservation of energy
Shaul Katzir, The emergence of energy conservation: The contribution of developments in mechanics
David E. Rowe, Riemann reads Helmholtz: German natural philosophy after 1847
Scott A. Walter, Electromagnetic momentum and energy conservation in Göttingen electrodynamics, 1900–1909

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Shifting Perspectives: Diversity, Geographies, and Possibilities in the Physical Sciences
Organizers: Joanna Behrman, Gisela Mateos, and Barbara Hof | Chairs: Barbara Hof and Gisela Mateos

Part 1
Annelie Elisabeth Drakman, Fun in physics: From reverence to play in 20th-century science
Colleen Seidel, Transformations in the historiography of physics and astronomy? Canonical narratives and the representation of female physicists and astronomers (1950–1999)
Johannes-Geert Hagmann, The unseen cohort: Women scientists in the US national interest programs
Phillip Roth, Preprints, libraries, and the women who built the physics communication infrastructure in the 20th century

Part 2
Climério Paulo da Silva Neto, Diversity, disagreements, and the physical sciences
Joanna Behrman, Find/database/network: Using digital tools to map educational trajectories and institutional networks among historical women in physics
Roberto Lalli, Fusing diversity: National traditions, disciplinary boundaries, and the making of a European fusion community, 1957–2007
Xavier Roqué, Small-scale research as a resurgent way to approach diversity in the physical sciences

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Universal Claims and Their Consequences in the 20th- and 21st-Century Earth and Climate Sciences
Organizers: Martin Speirs, Emilie Skulberg, Floris Winckel, and Erik Isberg | Chair: Dania Achermann

Erik Isberg, Whose “geophysics”? Petroleum prospecting and planetary data in interwar geophysical research
Floris Winckel, Whose “cryosphere”? Struggles to define and institutionalise the study of the world’s ice in the first half of the 20th century
Emilie Skulberg and Martin Speirs, Whose “collapse”? The interaction between mathematical, textual, and visual representations in the history of research on Atlantic Ocean circulation

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New Perspectives on the History of Science Diplomacy, Part 1
Chair: Cyrus C. M. Mody

Sofia Guilhem Basilio and Ivã Gurgel, Scientific diplomacy and political exclusion: Bernard Peters and the globalization of particle physics
Doubravka Olsakova, Two letters to the Pugwash: Sakharov’s critique of Soviet science diplomacy
Carola Sachse, Uyghurs in the spotlight of evolutionary and forensic genetics: A Sino-German collaboration 2005–2020

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Models, Concepts, and Boundaries in the 19th and Early 20th Century

Hajime Inaba, The language of the “statistical": Contrasting Maxwell and Boltzmann on gas theory
Eoin Carter, Sirius business: Infidel astronomy and the dog-days king
Nichole Levesley, Whence “physical astronomy”? Mapping disciplinary boundaries of astronomical sciences in 19th-century Europe
Roland Wittje, Hydrodynamic fields of force: Bjerknes’s experimental program on the mechanical nature of electromagnetism

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At the Fringes of Earth Science Models
Organizer: Barbara Mercier | Chair: Dania Achermann

Pablo Lima Hernandez, Oceanographic models and diplomacy by the margins
Giovanni Fava, Modeling the world in the 1970s: Historical and political struggles in the genesis of the World3 and Bariloche models
Barbara Mercier, Weathering numerical models

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Other talks that caught our eye

Patrick Charbonneau, Quantum mechanics and the development of computers in the 1920s and 1930s
Valentina Roberti, Failed instruments as epistemic mediators: The case of Helmholtz’s phakoscope
Benjamin Lindquist, Viscous signals: Paint, paper tools, and the science of graphic sound in postwar Britain
Kaori Watanabe, Revisiting 19th-century visual photometry: Instruments, practices, and reciprocal influences
Sharad Pandian, “An instrument which tells us what the body feels": The kata-thermometer and the measurement of comfort
Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Equations embodied: Models of thermodynamic surfaces and the circulation of knowledge
Sebastian Fernandez-Mulligan, Mathematical metaphors and the birth of American complexity science
Xiaoyue Hu, International data circulation in the geosciences: The case of China (1950s–2000s)
Eva Kaufholz-Soldat, Ctrl+c, ctrl+v. Compute. Beyond the amateur/professional divide in astronomy and early computing
Blesil T K, The knowledge networks of the Indian gravitational wave physicists in the LIGO project

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Tuesday, July 14

History of Quantum Optics
Organizer and Chair: Gautier Depambour

Part 1
Daniela Monaldi, From Bose-Einstein statistics to photon statistics: The statistical style of scientific reasoning in the genesis of quantum optics
Gautier Depambour, Leonard Mandel’s journey to quantum light
David Kaiser, From curious hippies to quantum optics: Tackling loopholes in experimental tests of Bell’s inequality
Gregg Jaeger, From experimental metaphysics to quantum technology: An investigator’s account

Part 2
Benjamin Wilson, Military-industrial entanglement: Quantum optics and the history of spontaneous parametric down-conversion
Alexei Kojevnikov, Entangled histories: Nonlinearity, lasers, and quantum optics in the Soviet Union
Yannan Zhu, The origins and development of quantum optics in China

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Recovering the Histories of Women in Quantum Physics
Chair: Patrick Charbonneau

Part 1
Margriet van der Heijden, Feminism and societal expectations: Paul Ehrenfest, Tatiana Afanassjewa, and the limits of escaping an androcentric physics
Elena Schaa, The work of a great physicist? Heisenberg’s erasure of women’s work in his history of quantum mechanics
Michelle Frank, Networks of support, collaboration, and mentorship in physics

Part 2
Bretislav Friedrich, Erika Cremer (1900–1996): From fundamental contributions to quantum physics to gas chromatography
Andrea Reichenberger, From quantum logic to fuzzy theory: Paulette Destouches-Février (1914–2013)
Commentators: Elena Schaa and Margriet van der Heijden

Note: The related workshop “Entangled Histories: Women, Quantum Physics, and the Power of Connections” is taking place from July 9 to 11 at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany.

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Ground Truth: From Local Data to Global Theories of the Earth
Chair: Simon Naylor

Marianne Klemun, The retreat of the planet’s oceans, from Dante to Suess: From everyday observations to concepts, the circulation of knowledge, and the creation of feeds
Gregory A. Good, The physical geosciences in the 19th century: Global sciences and their contexts
Nanina Foehr, Discordant measurements and models of concordance in mid-century geochronology

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Through Archival and Material Sources: New Perspectives in the History of Physics (19th–20th Centuries)
Organizer: Elisabetta Rossi | Chair: Adele La Rana

Alessandro Amabile, A new perspective on Hamilton’s theory of quaternions
Elisabetta Rossi, Guido Horn d’Arturo and the technological roots of modern astrophysics
Luca Campagnoni, Bruno Rossi and the chambers of secrets: Evolution of cosmic-ray techniques in the interwar period
Domenica Verduci, Reshaping the past: Enrico Fermi’s 1934 experiments between history and immersion

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Intersections between History and Philosophy of Physics

Laura Bujalance, Contested truths and vanished worlds: Reclaiming Weberian electrodynamics through histories of epistemic disobedience
Ivã Gurgel and Alexander Brilhante Coelho, Politics, prestige, and heterodoxy: Mario Schenberg’s intellectual trajectory in 1980s Brazil
Noah Stemeroff, The philosophy within physics: Pauli and Heisenberg on Schopenhauer and Goethe
Carla Almeida, Historical origin of the current crisis in cosmology

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Laboratories of Concealment: New Perspectives on Postwar Science, Secrecy, and the State
Organizer: Hannah Ahlblad | Chair: Gisela Mateos

Alex Wellerstein, The architecture of secrecy
Dwai Banerjee, Splitting modernisms: Art and industry in India’s nuclear program
Hannah Ahlblad, Curating the atom: Transnational exhibits, national aspirations, and the Cold War physics laboratory
Commentator: Itty Abraham

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Developments in the History of Particle Physics
Chair: Karl Hall

Mariam Sabri, Founding Fermilab: Satire, speculative simulation, and spontaneous symmetry in Leon Lederman’s liminal laboratory
Adele La Rana, Italy, China, and the USSR at the particle zoo: Uneven reception of antihyperon discoveries at the dawn of the Standard Model
Lara Marziali, The entanglement of physics and informatics in Bologna from the 1950s to 1980s
Sébastien Rivat, The evolution of Steven Weinberg’s conception of effective field theories in the 1970s

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Mathematics in Manuscripts, Part 2
Organizers: Emmylou Haffner and Tilman Sauer | Chair: Emmylou Haffner

Tilman Sauer, Why study Einstein’s mathematical manuscripts?
David Waszek, Bourbaki’s “redactions": Reconstructing values of intelligibility from drafts of expository material
Stefano Furlan, The storehouse of imagination—or, John Wheeler’s notebooks

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Other talks that caught our eye

Joyce Zhao, Nuclear secrecy and radiation safety at the Metallurgical Laboratory, 1942–1946
Colleen E. Anderson, East German space research in the 1980s
Julia Bloemer, Practices in parallel: Experiments in early-20th-century physics laboratories
Carolyn Russo, Access denied, access gained: Gender and the visual documentation of NASA’s early science
Stefan Walberer, Analysis of a hair hygrometer: Exploring scientific practices in the history of meteorology
Alice Naisbitt, The politics of big science: Competition, consensus-building, and cooperation in the Square Kilometre Array (1980s–2025)
Hiroto Kono, Doing physics otherwise: The rise and fall of “Terada physics”
Joseph D. Martin, The liquidation of solid state physics

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Wednesday, July 15

Shifting Perspectives on Histories of Gravity and Mass
Organizers and Chairs: Jean-Philippe Martinez, Bernadette Lessel, and Robert van Leeuwen

Part 1
Mahmoud Jalloh, Similitude and scalar gravity: Tolman’s principle and Nordtröm’s theory
Alexandre Sampaio da Cruz and Rafael Velloso Luz, The Viennese approach to general relativity: A philosophical analysis of Guido Beck’s exposition in the 1929 Handbuch der Physik
Jonathan Emile Fay, Deriving gravity: 20th-century Machian models and the Zitterbewegung hypothesis

Part 2
Bernadette Lessel, On textbooks and their contexts during the renaissance of general relativity
Shelly Yiran Shi, Patchwork gravity: From geometric unity to methodological pluralism
Jean-Philippe Martinez, Embracing methodological pluralism: Waveform modeling in pursuit of gravitational waves

Part 3
Alessio Rocci, Shifting perspectives on the self-energy problem: The contribution from the early years of quantum gravity (1930–1950)
Robert van Leeuwen, Gravity in the wake of the Standard Model: Dual string theory, supergravity, and unification
Victoria Zwierzyk-Teles, The heuristic influence of mathematical symmetries on 20th-century conceptions of mass

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New Perspectives on Climate Change in the Long 1970s
Organizer: Alexander Hall | Chair: Fiona Williamson

Frank Gerits, Climate change as a hidden hazard of development aid: The discovery of climate change in the US development programmes from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter (1970–1985)
Alexander Hall, Green pieces: Exploring the connections between Canadian climate science, environmental activism, and popular environmental discourse
Alex Hibberts, The great climate chimera: The “Little Ice Age” in the long 1970s
Robert Naylor, Changing the human timescale: Temporal negotiation of climate in historical climatology

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Other talks that caught our eye

Mor Lumbroso, Conceiving light: Linking the life sciences with quantum mechanics in 1920s Copenhagen
Amelia Bonea, Visible radiation, invisible scientists: Kinoshita Suekichi and Ruchi Ram Sahni’s early-20th-century research on nuclear photographic emulsions
Barbara Hof, New perspectives on the history of the CERN laboratory: The 1980s
Carl Joseph Sciglitano, Hybrid practices in astronomical image-making between plate and pixel

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Thursday, July 16

Histories of 19th and 20th Century Astronomy
Chair: Toner Marie Stevenson

Solomon Hajramezan, William H. Pickering’s Society of the International Associated Observers of Mars, 1915–1930
Zijian Xia, Astronomy across empires: The circulation and contestation of celestial knowledge in late Qing science fiction
Erin Rose Manson, The geopolitically networked heritage of Irish astronomy at Boyden Observatory, South Africa, 1950–1978
Pedro Ruiz-Castell, Astronomy and the geopolitics of scientific reintegration: Spain in the early Cold War

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Fractures, Withdrawals, and Non-Cooperation: Contested Moments of Breakdown in International Scientific Organizations, Part 2
Organizer and Chair: Li Zhang

Ce Gao, An analysis of the controversy between Steven Weinberg and Chen-Ning Yang over large particle colliders
Peng Peng, The divergence in scientific styles between Richard Feynman and Chen-Ning Yang: The concrete manifestation of differences between Chinese and Western cultures in international scientific cooperation

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Listen: Sound Science Across Time, Part 2
Chair: Alexandra Hui

Quintino Lopes, The PHONLAB project: Armando de Lacerda and the Coimbra Experimental Phonetics Laboratory (1930–1979)
Cathy Lucas, The removal of the hand: Gesture, metrology, and music in early voice acoustics

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Business Meeting—A New CERN History Project: Charting the Story of the World’s Foremost Laboratory for Particle Physics
Chair: Barbara Hof | Participants: James Gillies, Rüdiger Voss, and Tullio Basaglia

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Emerging from the Shadow: New Perspectives on Solar Eclipse Expeditions
Organizers: Megan Briers and Jesse Garrison | Chairs: David Aubin and Joshua Nall

Part 1
Jesse Garrison, Building the eclipse enterprise: Administration, diplomacy, and the making of British eclipse expeditions
Frédéric Soulu, An 1860 eclipse expedition by a “simple amateur": d’Abbadie at Briviesca
Beatrice Honey Steele, Exhibiting the eclipse: Victorian visual culture and the Norman Lockyer Observatory image archive
Megan Briers, “Even if the other man is a lady or a camera": Women and the British Astronomical Association expeditions

Part 2
Hugo Soares and Ana Simões, Visualising (and not visualising) eclipses
Rebecka Mikaela Mähring, Bringing Greenwich to Sobral: Craftsmanship and instrumentation on the 1919 solar eclipse expedition
Toner Marie Stevenson, How the 1922 total solar eclipse inspired an Australian dairy maid and amateur astronomers
Deborah Kent, Future directions in the history of eclipse expeditions

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Earth and the Environment: Cosmic, Plural, and Contested Perspectives
Organizer: James Rodger Fleming | Chair: Gregory A. Good

Katrin Kleemann, The discovery and study of submarine canyons: Francis Shepard and the La Jolla fan system in the context of contested theories and shifting methods
Sara B. Pritchard, Satellites and the making of the nocturnal global and planetary, 1961–2012

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Other talks that caught our eye

Qian Chen, Scientific autonomy versus discourse power: China in the 20th-century International Polar and Geophysical Years
Joris Vandendriessche, Globalizing the conference: A network analysis of the general assemblies of the International Astronomical Union (1922–1991)
Ion Mihailescu, The scandal of ephemeris time: A new astronomical definition of the second in the age of atomic clocks, 1955–1967
Kristian Camilleri, Rethinking personality in the history of science: The case of quantum orthodoxy
Sang-Hyun Kim, Revisiting climate science and politics in the 1960s and 1970s: The role of simple climate models
Aimee Slaughter, Sculpting Oppenheimer’s legacies
Luca Forgiarni, Science for Europe: CERN and the conceptual construction of European scientific cooperation

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The AIP History Team
American Institute of Physics
history@aip.org

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