To close out Women's History Month, in today's AIP History Weekly Edition we look at The Observatory Pinafore. The satire offers a window into how women's roles at the observatory changed between its writing in 1879 and performance in 1929-30—a remarkable narrative of opportunity and frustration.

This seemingly puts all DOE science projects in one pot. In the past, these have been separately prioritized within programs (high-energy physics, nuclear physics, advanced computing, fusion...). I wonder if they will eventually try to pool the programs' construction budgets?

Thanks to everyone who joined us on Friday for Elise Crull's lecture on Hertha Sponer's experimental work on the wave-like properties of electrons and its place in the history of quantum physics. The video is now posted!

ICYMI, some good news from @science.org: NASA has revived its next-generation satellite missions, which will study changing clouds and rainfall and use hyperspectral imagery to chart ecosystems, critical minerals, and greenhouse gases. These are big climate missions, even if NASA can't say that.

AIP's head of policy research, Lindsay Milliken, has a new primer up on the Trump administration's pending proposal to require short-term visitors to the US who do not require visas to open their social media to screening. (This requirement is already in place for student and exchange visas.)

Pouring one out for all the hours congressional staffers have spent on bipartisan NASA authorizing legislation.

📣 Q&A via the American Institute of Physics @aip.bsky.social IHPST PhD Julia Menzel on Kenneth Wilson, the renormalization group & supercomputing. A sharp look at how physics, policy & institutions reshaped each other. 🔗https://www.aip.org/history/q-a-julia-menzel #histsci #physics

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, Anna Doel looks at environmental historian Sverker Sörlin’s recent book, Snö. Mixing scientific, historical, cultural, and personal perspectives, Snö offers a tour through humans' ambivalent relationship with snow and ice in a changing world.

@statnews.com conducted a national survey of NIH-funded researchers and found that, a year after Trump's return, many scientists are reeling, with some closing labs entirely. ‘This is like the Titanic,' one respondent told me. For full details, see our special report www.statnews.com/2026/03/19/n...

These delightful quotes from Ginsparg help explain a lot about how you get something as idiosyncratic (at the time) as arXiv in the first place.

I've just noticed that the recording of my talk at Louvain-la-Neuve is online now. For all those interested in Thomas Kuhn's work on the history of quantum physics: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ET4...

I did an oral history with Bennett and Brassard together a couple years ago now. I need to push to make it available, because it brought out this fun dynamic between the two of them very nicely.

Wondering why NIH and NSF aren't making new grants? We explain what's happening at OMB. www.science.org/content/arti...

The talks from the Helgoland quantum centenary last year are now online. www.newquantumera.com/blog/helgola...

Exciting to see & hear India Bhalla-Ladd’s prize winning paper at #APSSummit26 Powerful use of @aip.bsky.social archives to explore the role that technical typists played in resolving the page charge crisis. Broadly relevant to anyone working on the history of scholarly communication.

We just did some work on the duration of status (D/S) elimination proposal. Part of DHS's rationale is there are 6x more students/yr admitted now than 1978 when D/S was instituted. In '78, part of INS' rationale in instituting D/S was ... the increasing number of students gumming up the system.

NSF Update through March 13, 2026 1/2

On top of the slowdown in grantmaking I wrote about last week - this is another deeply worrisome trend for scientists, physicians, patients, families, and basically anyone who wants new treatments and new tools to promote health. 🆘🧪🥼 open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

If you are in DC, one week from today the amazing Elise Crull from the CCNY philosophy department is doing an evening talk at AIP about Hertha Sponer and the role experimentalists played in the jump from electron diffraction to wave/particle duality. #HPS Register here: www.aip.org/history/elis...

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social looks at Eun-Joo Ahn's recent @hsnatsci.bsky.social article on how perilous road construction in the San Gabriel Mtns, undertaken by immigrant Japanese laborers, made Mount Wilson Observatory possible. 📷 from Huntington Library.

In 1896, Florence Bascom became the first woman to work for USGS! She was also the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from @jhu.edu (in 1893) and created the geology program at Bryn Mawr College. She retired at age 74. #WomensHistoryMonth

Astronomer Ellen Dorrit Hoffleit was born #OTD in 1907. She discovered more than 1,000 new variable stars over the course of her career, worked in the Harvard and Yale observatories, and edited the Bright Star Catalog. 🧪 🔭 👩‍🔬 Image: American Association of Variable Star Observers

One year ago, the Dept of Homeland Security started running 1.3 million int'l student records through the National Crime Information Center Database. AIP's brand-new policy guide walks through what has happened since then at the intersection of visa & immigration policy and science policy. #SciPol

For reference, without AXIS, the earliest that a high-resolution X-ray imaging mission can launch -- the successor to the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- is 2050s or 2060s. 🔭

#RIP Tony Leggett. He was a great physicist, winning the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. He contributed to several fields of physics, just look at his papers: journals.aps.org/search/resul... He was also an outstanding & thoughtful referee for decades. physicsworld.com/a/condensed-...

QUOTE OF THE DAY

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, we draw on oral histories conducted by the late Joan Bromberg to revisit the 1960s-era quest to do an experimental test of Bell's theorem. At stake was whether quantum randomness and what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" are real phenomena. #HPS

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, we draw on oral histories conducted by the late Joan Bromberg to revisit the 1960s-era quest to do an experimental test of Bell's theorem. At stake was whether quantum randomness and what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" are real phenomena. #HPS

Lee MacDonald’s The Royal Observatory, Greenwich is available online uclpress.co.uk/book/the-roy...

Just us at AIP in Washington, DC, on Friday, March 20, as we welcome philosopher and historian Elise Crull for our first Lyne Starling Trimble public event of the year: "Hertha Sponer and the Path from Electron Diffraction to Wave/Particle Duality" RSVP today: www.aip.org/history/elis...

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, I look at the long journey of quantum entanglement from thought experiment to actual experiments, highlighting some recent historical work on the subject. (You maybe saw this in our print newsletter, but, if not, check it out. Or, hey, check it out again!)

This sent me to brush up on Einstein's "personality rights". These were litigated in the US in Hebrew University of Jerusalem v General Motors, wherein a CA judge ruled personality rights endure no more than 50 years after death. The case involved this pic: More info: cdas.com/einstein-pub...

I am of the opinion that lore nerds should apply their passion to real history, which is categorically incapable of contradicting itself. Then they can get into productive disputes about contradictory sources and interpretive ambiguity. I am aware that this is unquestionably a monkey's paw wish.

I'm glad to see others thinking along these lines. At AIP we are developing formats that complement books and articles. Our weekly email newsletter is designed to maintain a steady cadence; our new history guides will emphasize non-linearity, supplementary materials, and search engine optimization.

Do historians focus too much on producing academic books? In her essay for our most recent volume @aileenfyfe.bsky.social her team's research project "Publishing the Philosophical Transactions: the social, cultural and economic history of a learned journal, 1665–2015"

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, University of Padua PhD student Luca Campagnoni discusses his work with a newly discovered trove of materials related to cosmic ray physicist Bruno Rossi. It sheds new light on Rossi's expedition to Eritrea and his pre-World War II flight from Italy to the US.

Here I feel it's worth pointing out that in opinion polls scientists have a 30-point trust advantage over journalists. While everyone has much to learn from everyone else, I want to hear much more about how journalists could learn about trust from scientists www.pewresearch.org/science/2023...

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, @tjowens.bsky.social interviews @patchenbarss.bsky.social about how he researched and wrote The Impossible Man, a biography of mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.

This is just unquestionably true, mainly because books are supposed to have a main point. So, scholars will spend many years of their lives essentially organizing their work around the demonstration of a single point. How many side points, how much documentation, gets sacrificed to that end?

The AIP stats team has released its latest data of physics & astronomy PhD trends, with breakdown by gender. What is extraordinary to me is how clearly the overall trends exhibit an important gender dimension, and that that story is quite different between physics and astronomy.

I'm really happy to have this long-awaited guide up and running. Michel and Gernot did a great job of thinking about how a web site can complement a book chapter. We're busily working away on both history and policy guides that will follow its example. Please have a look!

Washington has a rich scientific history! Come hear Greg, Teasel, and Sara talk about it at AIP on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 26.

Having grown up a couple miles from a ski jump in Minnesota, I'm a little surprised to see that this was evidently some sort of regional strength? There's not much of it in the Rockies? www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olymp...

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, Anna Doel interviews Ankita Anirban about her interview/book project on the successful push at Bell Labs to elevate black scientists. At a time when such efforts are on the back foot, it's important to know more about these examples.

Great blend of personal narrative and compelling nuclear physics. Colliders like RHIC (and the EIC) are often overlooked by people focusing on the highest energies of particle physics—which I've been guilty of. A fitting final toast(ed bagel) for RHIC.

The funding cuts also include £59 million for the Electron-Ion Collider in Brookhaven.

Very bad news for CERN, it seems.

So, who's going to write the five-volume history of star culture in science, 1975 to 2020? What needs to be in there?

If we all agree it is convincing, we can prove the philosophical primacy of social epistemology.